Pool Remodel Cost (2026): the whole job, in order.

The crew kills power to the equipment at the breakers and photographs every valve position, so your system goes back exactly as it was. Then the water goes — to the street or to a sewer cleanout, depending on your local law; a licensed contractor knows which. A couple of hours with a trash pump to the street; up to a day or two when the route is restricted.

Before demo, the surface gets tapped out for hollow spots — places the old finish has separated underneath. Six to eight chip-outs are normal wear and typically included in the price. A pool that sounds like a drum everywhere is a different conversation, and better to have it now than mid-job.

Either the old surface is chipped out with pneumatic hammers — one to three days of loud, dusty, honest work — or it's hydro-jetted at 4,500 PSI and up, which strips everything loose and lets the crew chip only the hollow spots. Your contractor's choice usually comes down to region and what the next surface needs.

The crew cuts a V-notch under every inch of existing tile, leaving a half-inch-to-inch lip the new surface tucks up behind. It’s tedious — up to a day or two — and it’s roughly twice the work of just demoing the tile. Which sets up a decision worth doing with open eyes: if the old tile is failing, saving it can cost most of what replacing it would, the line may be discontinued, and 25 years of sun-fade means even a match won’t match. Sometimes keeping the tile is right. It should be a choice, not a default.

Here's a thing almost nobody explains. When your pool's shell was built, the top of it was never perfectly level — a second crew built it up so coping could sit flat, and where those two pours meet is a cold joint. Concrete is not waterproof; it's only watertight. When old grout fails and water reaches that joint, seasons of expansion and contraction can pop it. A foot of failed beam is a routine patch. Eight or twenty feet is a real change order — and if coping wasn't in your scope, it may have to come up anyway to fix it right.

Any exposed or rusty rebar gets ground clean of oxidation, treated with a rust inhibitor, waterproofed, and patched. Structurally damaged bar gets cut out and new bar spliced in. Every penetration through the shell — returns, skimmer, light — gets prepped so the new surface can seal tight behind it.

If you're adding anything structural — a bench, a Baja shelf, reshaping — it happens now: holes drilled, rebar pinned, a cage built, concrete shot or poured. This is the one moment in your pool's next twenty years when this work is cheap to add.

Everything above the waterline references the coping, so it leads.

The tile crew sets the band under the coping edge, and does the step and trim tile in the same visit. Glass moves roughly 30-50% more than ceramic or porcelain, and a band that lives half in water, half in sun needs the right setting system or it will pop off.

A fact that surprises almost everyone: standard white plaster IS the waterproofing layer. But pebble aggregate makes the finished surface non-waterproof, so a pebble job includes a membrane beneath it — about a day of work you will never see, doing the most important job in the pool.

Plaster: mixed on site, applied in a single day by a full crew, and the pool starts filling the same day. Pebble: two days — applied, then acid-washed the next morning to expose the aggregate — then the fill. Either way, the moment the water starts rising, the clock starts on the most ignored step of all.