Patios and covered decks
Cool deck coating for patios and covered decks
A patio usually meets a pool surround or a house wall somewhere on the property, and that meeting point is where most patios show their age first.
Chapter 01
Where patios actually fail
The failure on a patio almost never starts in the middle of the slab. It starts at the seam, the line where the patio meets the pool surround or meets the house foundation. That is where homeowners across the Valley notice a color break first, or a lip where one side has settled a fraction lower than the other, or a crack that opens right along the joint rather than across open concrete.
The reason is simple once you know it: those are two separate pours, placed at different times, sitting on different bearing, and they move independently of each other under Phoenix heat cycling and soil movement. A patio poured a year after the pool deck was never going to move in exact lockstep with it, and a coating that ignores that seam is coating over the actual problem instead of addressing it.
Cool deck coating on a covered deck beside a lap pool, depth markings visible on the surround
Running one finish across both
Part of what we do on a patio job is coat the bare cement under the cover to match the pool surround, so the patio and the pool deck read as one continuous plane instead of two different slabs that happen to sit next to each other. It is a small change with an outsized effect, because the eye reads a property by its transitions, and a matched finish removes the one transition that usually gives a backyard away as unfinished.
One of our customers, Phil L, had exactly this done, coating the bare cement under his patio cover to match the pool surround around it. In his own words: "Beautiful results, professionally done. We also had the bare cement under the patio covering done to match the pool surround, and what a difference that made! I would recommend doing that for everyone." That is one homeowner's outcome on his own property in AZ, not a claim about every patio job, but it is the kind of change we point out on an estimate when a patio and a pool deck sit this close together.
Chapter 03
A covered deck is a different surface problem
Shade changes the physics of a concrete coating more than most homeowners expect. A covered patio dries slower after we spray it, which changes the timing on the job, and it sees far less direct UV over its life, which is good for the coating's color but not the whole story. Less sun also means more organic staining, leaf litter, dust that never gets baked off by direct light the way an open pool deck's does, so a covered surface marks differently and needs a different cleaning habit than the open deck right next to it.
We account for that at the estimate stage rather than treating a covered patio the same as an open pool surround, because the two surfaces age on different clocks even when they are coated the same color on the same day. If your patio meets a courtyard or an entryway instead of a pool, the transition problem is the same one we solve there.
AZ Deck — Licensed, bonded and insured. AZROC #288172. Call (480) 712-3762.
Matching a patio to what is already there
A patio rarely stands alone. It usually sits next to a pool deck we have already resurfaced, or it opens onto a courtyard with its own coating. On any of those jobs we look at the whole run of concrete on the property, not just the slab we were called out for, because a patio that matches everything around it reads as one finished space instead of a patchwork of separate projects. Recent work is in the gallery, and a free estimate on your own patio starts with a call or a message through contact.
Free estimates on patios and covered decks, Valleywide from Queen Creek.
Call (480) 712-3762