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jslazart

I'll just remove this loose tile...

5 years ago

Everything I touch in this house is a Pandora's box. TLDR: What would you do with this back porch floor (and pool deck)?


When I bought this house 2 years ago, the porch was covered in a very blue slate-ish porcelain tile and many of the tiles were loose. I thought I would pull them up and just use the bare concrete indefinitely, but when I pulled them up, I did not find your typical concrete:





I *think* this is what happened. When built, they put some type of exposed aggregate topcoat on the concrete. The aggregate is white. They then decided they didn't like it and used some type of brittle white filler to level a few spots before gluing down green outdoor carpet (evidence: yellow glue, green fibers in the expansion joints). The previous owners then pulled up the carpet and laid tile right over the glue *and* the expansion joints. A few years later, the tiles are coming up left and right.


But that leaves me at my dilemma: What do I do now!? To make matters worse, this butts up to my pool deck that is also in rough shape (whatever top coat they used right before selling it to us looked good, but is now flaking off in sheets as the underlying Kool Deck and various patches fail), e.g.:





I'm not even sure where to start with who to call and how to fix this. I assume I should call a pool specialist about the deck. It will either require stripping everything off the existing concrete deck, patching, and starting over, or ripping out the existing concrete and starting over with a new pour. Does that sound right?


Then there is the porch: The aggregate seems stable, so assuming I can powerwash out the glue and other bits, what do I do with it? I don't trust an overlay to last. Seal it with something and live with it? Re-tile (cleaning it first this time and avoiding the expansion joints)? Rent a jack hammer? The budget is whatever it needs to be to do this once and never again. (We hope to be here ~20-40 more years.)

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