How long will our pool be out of service for repairs?

Valeriy — Application Specialist, Joint Seal Waterproofing — concrete pool refurbishments across the GTA and Miami

Crack repair takes about two days. Resurfacing takes ten days to two weeks. A full refurbishment runs around three weeks. The drain-down adds twenty-four hours at the front of all of them, and the refill adds a day at the back. Which of those numbers applies to your building depends on whether the finish is staying or coming off — not on how many cracks there are.

That is the part property managers rarely get told, and it is the number that matters when you are writing the notice for the elevator. The repair is not what closes the pool. The resurfacing is.

How long does the drain-down itself take?

Draining a condominium pool takes a minimum of twenty-four hours, and slower is better. This is not a pump-capacity problem. A full pool holds its shell expanded under load, and emptying it lets the structure contract. Both the drain and the fill are deliberately slowed to keep that movement small.

So before any work starts, a day is gone. Build it into the schedule and into the notice.

How long does crack repair take?

Ten to fifteen cracks in a pool shell take about two days to repair, and the pool can be refilled the day after the work finishes. Each crack is opened out with a chipping gun — on a through-slab crack, from both faces, inside the pool and from the pool mechanical room underneath. Then epoxy injection, a bonding coat, parging, and a six-inch band of woven fibreglass over the line bonded in epoxy.

Two days. That is the whole crack repair on a typical condominium pool.

If the scope stops there, the pool is out of service for roughly four days end to end: a day to drain, two days of work, a day to fill. Most people expect a fortnight.

Why does resurfacing take ten days to two weeks?

Resurfacing takes ten days to two weeks because most of it is discovery, not application. The finish comes off first — the whole interior surface is ground back to remove the existing coating completely. Only then can anyone see what the pool is actually made of.

What comes next is the reason the range is wide:

1. The hidden cracks appear. Fine surface cracks that the coating was masking become visible for the first time. They are repaired from the inside face only, since they don’t pass through the concrete.
2. The whole surface gets sounded with a hammer. Sound concrete rings sharp. Hollow concrete rings dull. Everything that rings hollow is marked.
3. Every marked area is chipped out and refilled with new concrete, back to sound material.
4. Then the finish goes back on.

On a normal condominium pool, step three amounts to about two square feet of hollow concrete across the entire shell. On one pool in Miami it was thirty to forty percent of the surface, because the concrete had never been properly vibrated when the pool was built and nobody had ever sounded it. That is not normal, but it is the reason the schedule has a range rather than a number.

What does a full refurbishment schedule look like?

A full refurbishment of a 1,600 square foot pool runs about three weeks, and the trades overlap. This is the strip-to-bare-concrete rebuild — everything comes off, a new waterproofing system goes on, and the pool is refinished.

Days	Work	Crew
1–5	Demolition — tile and finish off, down to bare concrete	4
6–10	Crack and patch repair, if required	4
11–15	Geotextile membrane and fleece taping	4
16	Non-slip sand broadcast	4
17	Cure — minimum 24 hours	—
17–21	Waterline and perimeter tile	2 tilers
18–21	Coping stone, overlapping the tile	3
22	Marbelite finish, then fill the same day	~15
Throughout	Perimeter expansion joint, in parallel	2

With no crack or patch repair needed, the whole thing pulls forward five days.

Two things about that table are worth flagging. The five days allotted to crack and patch repair is a best case — on a badly deteriorated pool it has run to ten days with four people. And the last line matters: the perimeter expansion joint is a separate crew working alongside everything else, not a sequential step.

On a pool deck restoration at a mid-rise on Inverhouse Drive in Mississauga, the deck and concrete steps covered 3,200 square feet and needed full concrete repair before any waterproofing went down. Deck work of that size runs alongside the shell work rather than after it — which is how three weeks stays three weeks.

Why does the finish have to be flooded the same day?

Marbelite must cure under water, so the pool is filled the same day the finish goes on. Leave it dry overnight and the finish cracks. It has to be in water at all times.

The same rule at small scale is why a localised floor patch gets flooded about fifteen minutes after the last trowel — covered in whether your pool has to be drained at all.

This drives one other thing on the schedule that catches people out: the pool lights have to be reinstalled before the fill starts. Miss that window and someone is diving to fit lamps underwater.

What most people get wrong

Boards budget the crack repair and forget the resurfacing, then get surprised by a three-week closure. Or the opposite — a building defers a two-day crack repair for a year because they think it means closing the pool for a month.

Those are two days and two weeks. They are not the same job and they should never be quoted as one line.

What to do about it

Before the notice goes up, get the contractor to separate the schedule into four numbers: drain-down, repair, finish, refill. If the finish is staying, the middle two collapse and you are looking at a few days. If the finish is coming off, plan for three weeks and tell residents three weeks.

And ask what happens if the sounding finds more hollow concrete than expected — because that is the one line item that can move, and you want the answer before the pool is empty rather than on day nine.

Book an inspection and we will walk your pool and give you a schedule you can defend to a board before the amenity closes.

More on swimming pool repair and waterproofing, concrete surface repair and patching, or read why nobody can price a pool repair until the coating comes off.

See the work. Pool projects: Pool Deck Restoration and Waterproofing · Complete Restoration and Waterproofing Solutions for Swimming Pools. More in our projects.