Pool Resurfacing in Houston, TX

When a pool needs resurfacing

A pool interior tells you when it's done. The signs: the finish feels rough or sandpapery underfoot where it's etched; there are stains and mottled discoloration that won't brush or treat out; you can see or feel exposed aggregate or the gray shell showing through in patches; there are hollow or delaminating spots where the finish has lost its bond; and the surface has crazed into a map of fine cracks. Plaster chipping at the steps and in high-wear areas, and stubborn staining around the waterline, are the common first complaints.

Resurfacing strips the problem back to the shell and puts a fresh, watertight, smooth finish back on. It's not the same as a patch — a failing plaster surface patched in one spot usually fails next to the patch within a season, because the whole finish is at the end of its life, not just the piece that let go first.

Plaster, quartz, pebble, and tile

The finish you choose sets how the pool looks, how it feels, and how long it lasts before the next resurface.

Standard plaster is the traditional white or tinted cement finish — the lowest cost and the smoothest, with the shortest life. Quartz is plaster with quartz aggregate blended in, tougher and more stain-resistant than standard plaster, with more color options and a longer life. Pebble is an exposed small-aggregate finish — the most durable of the common options and the longest-lasting, with a textured feel underfoot that some love and some don't. Tile is the premium surface, fully waterproof and the longest-lived of all, and the most involved and expensive to install.

We'll walk you through the tradeoff honestly — feel underfoot, color and look, stain resistance, and how many years you get before you're resurfacing again — so the choice fits how you use the pool and how long you plan to keep it.

How a resurface runs

Resurfacing is a sequence, and each step gates the next. The pool is drained and the old finish prepped — chipped out where it's delaminating, or profiled so the new finish bonds. Any shell cracks and hollow spots are addressed before anything goes back on, because a new finish is only as sound as what's under it. Waterline tile and fittings are handled as the finish dictates. Then the new finish is applied and troweled and, for aggregate finishes, exposed and washed to bring the surface up. Finally the pool is refilled, and the new plaster is brought up to balanced water chemistry carefully over the first days, because how a fresh plaster surface is started has a lot to do with how it wears.

Weather matters in Houston. Fresh finishes don't want to go in during a cold snap or a downpour, so we schedule the application around it. We give you the realistic timeline up front, including the fill and start-up days, rather than an optimistic one.

What pool resurfacing costs in Houston

Pool resurfacing is priced by the surface area of the pool interior and the finish you choose. Current Houston-area material ranges, per square foot of pool surface:

• Standard plaster: roughly $6 to $8 per square foot, lasting about 7 to 12 years
• Quartz: roughly $7 to $10 per square foot, lasting about 10 to 15 years
• Pebble: roughly $7 to $15 per square foot, lasting about 15 to 20-plus years
• Aggregate finishes: roughly $6 to $15 per square foot
• Tile: roughly $8 to $30-plus per square foot, the longest-lived and most involved

Draining and cleaning the pool to prep it runs about $600 to $650 separately. For a typical 1,000 square foot pool surface, resurfacing averages around $11,000, with most jobs landing in the $6,000 to $15,000 range depending on finish and condition.

These are ranges, not quotes. The shell's condition, how much crack and hollow-spot repair it needs, waterline tile, and the finish you pick all move the number. We measure the surface and give you a real figure after seeing the pool.

What's not in our scope

We resurface the interior and handle the deck as a separate job. What we don't take on is the pool's mechanical scope: pumps, filters, underwater lighting, controls, water-supply and fill lines, and heaters are electrical and plumbing work we don't do, and they go to the trades that own them. On a resurface that's usually fine — the finish is independent of the equipment — but where lighting niches, returns, main drains, or fittings meet the new surface, we detail the finish around them and tell you clearly which pieces belong to another trade so nothing falls between the two.