Well, it's been a couple months. The deck nightmare has been over for a couple weeks. During demo all the drains got destroyed so it was a 100% re-do. The 2 tractors with breakers arrived on may 23, it was ugly. Removing 2500 sf 4-6" thin k concrete with rebar was a mess. I purchased 6 sheets of plywood to protect walls, windows, etc. and moved as needed. placed moving blankets on all the coping. the only casuallties were the handle and diverter on one of the jandy valves, easy fix, and the grout joint in a couple places on the coping from vibration. Lost some stacked stone that had to be put back in place but for all the potential issues that could have occured, i think we were lucky.
The pavers came out pretty nice and look WAY better than the concrete. When i look at the concrete photos i cant believe the difference. For those interested in the paver install: They are Belgard Catalina pavers, large and small pattern (6) pieces, the color is Victorian. It blended well with the Quartzite coping, ledger stone, and walls well, they pick up the silver/gold tones perfectly, depending on time of day they are more grey with a slight gold light brown.
I had them excavate 10-11" below the coping. We installed a geotextile membrane on the sub base and compacted Type II road base every four inches. The pavers are in 1" of bedding sand and we used Polymeric sand. I have to wait several months before sealing them.
So the gate was installed yesterday and I am waiting on pre-plaster inspection today **EDIT, just passed pre-plaster! Looking at plaster and water by the end of the week or early next week.
Now I have to decide on Tropics blue or Midnight blue Pebble plaster. Since I have been MIA for a couple months, have there been any new Tropics or Midnight blue builds?
Well since I am updating the thread, I did resolve a few other small issues since May. I replace the spa spill over as the original one was a different color stone and the edge looked broken on one side. I will post photos. This took several trips to the stone yard to find the right piece of stone with a slight radius on the leading edge and right sized. They popped it out pretty easily. I was worried for nothing. The other one was the ugly white skimmer color and lid. since I have stone coping with grout, I had them pop the white collar out (was set in grout) and replace it with a grey collar and grey lid. Looks much nicer than the white. Now the skimmer body is still white but you can't see it unless you take the lid off. Note to others, the skimmers come in White, Grey, Tan. If you have a preference ask before plumbing at least I could easily resolve this issue since I had stone coping, in concrete this could not have been done.
As far as the auto fill lid, I have the grey plastic pour-a-lid unit in place now. I still have the other pour-a-lid with my old concrete in it. I may try to stain the concrete to match the pavers or attempt to cut one the my extra pavers to fit inside the pour-a-lid. That's looks like a lot of work to attempt to do so we will see how that goes later.
I still need to get more top soil for the planters, plant some stuff, and hook up the drip lines, and low voltage lighting. I ran all the lines to the transformer and irrigation timer prior to the first deck. so I should be GTG.
We still need to do the front yard where drains, gas, and electric were run, we had to demo about 400SF of old concrete in the front on the house down to the sidewalk, I plan on taking a break from construction for a month or so before we decide on concrete or pavers for the front driveway, lol.
