I finished up a project earlier this week that I was expecting to be a lot more intensive than it turned out to be. About two hours of thorough scrubbing and two or three of application took the pool from this...
To this.
Go ahead and focus just on the formerly pink coping around the edge. Wait, I conveniently have a closeup for you, in case you forgot its pink awfulness.
A few weeks ago, I was at Home Depot browsing around the paint section and had this brainstorm: what if we stained the coping? We'd talked about redoing it, but it was going to be too expensive with the other little pool plumbing update we'd decided to do at the advice of the resurfacing company.
So I launched into researching
Behr Semi-Transparent Concrete Stain. Lot of super mixed reviews, but people mostly loved it or hated it, which told me some people did kind of a crappy job prepping or selected a surface that wasn't a good fit and thus hated the result, and some people did a good job prepping and picked a good surface and liked it.
I was pretty sure our very rough, very weathered and very porous coping was a good candidate. The "water drip" test confirmed the surface was open (the dripped water absorbed immediately). I figured that literally anything would be better than the pink, crossed my fingers it wouldn't flake off in three months leaving me with a huge mess and went for it. Here's my review of Behr's concrete stain, at least so far.
Before on the left, after application on the right in the photo below.
After some discussion, we ended up selecting Sunbaked Clay as the stain color. I tried that the day before and wasn't thrilled with the color, since it came out warmer and pinker than I was hoping. You can actually see a tiny bit of it in the image above, on the bottom right corner of the pink block. It's warmer than the end result. I took the can back and asked them to add some gray or green to dull the color and cool it off, which had very satisfactory results.
Lemme tell you, it was pretty fun
very carefully working my way around the deep end hovering above that swamp. I'm glad those boards were nice wide 2x12s, which were left from the tile job.
You can see that the stain didn't absorb immediately all over. I think this is at least in part due to the inconsistent weathering of the coping blocks, the original surface of which was mostly long gone but inconsistently worn. I also opted to use a throwaway chip brush to paint instead of rolling; the roller felt like it was applying too much product and seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I had to cut around the edge of the tile grout anyway so the brush was more efficient.
But by the time it dried (left, vs. just-applied on the right) it had soaked in very well and the color dried down some. The texture was just like it was before I stained: pretty rough and not slippery or finished-feeling. I like how the texture of the material comes through. It's exactly what I was hoping for when I went with the semi-transparent over the transparent stain.
This is a spot where the stain took inconsistently. I think for some reason the old original finish of the coping was left around the crack and in those pink speckles on the right and bottom of the image below. Hardly any of the coping had that smoother texture, and given that I have no reason to believe the coping was ever replaced in the 50-some years the pool's been here, I think it just wore off years ago.
Again, more inconsistent absorption.
On the whole, I'm pretty happy with this. It was $25 for the gallon, which I used about half of. Even if I had to redo this annually, I would still be satisfied. We'll see how it wears for the summer, with some traffic and water and chlorine and lots of sunshine.
A lot of the reviews I read commented that it wasn't stain, it was super thin paint. My opinion is that I might call it paint if I were applying it to a less-porous surface; I can see how it would sit on top and not sink in. But given how rough my surface was and how readily it sucked in anything liquid, it sure acted like a stain to me. It's latex/acrylic, not oil, so it's different than a wood stain, but I still think it acted more stain-like than paint-like.
I'll report back again (hopefully next year at the earliest) on how it's wearing. I'm optimistic for a good summer on it, but we'll see.
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