Pool Renovation, Installation, and Pool Deck Design
A pool renovation is rarely just about the pool. The water gets the attention, but what people actually live on is everything around it. The deck. The steps. The shade. The planting that hides the equipment and softens the fence line. Smitty's has been building that part of the backyard since 1980, and most of our pool work happens across Essex County and the towns nearby.
Some homeowners call us because their pool still works fine and the space around it has stopped making sense. Cracked concrete apron. A deck too narrow for chairs. Nowhere shaded to sit by three in the afternoon. Others are starting from bare lawn and want the pool, the patio, the walls, and the plantings designed as one project instead of four.
Either way, you get one crew and one point of contact from the first drawing to the last plant.
Renovating an Existing Pool
Pool renovation covers a lot of ground depending on what shape your yard is in. Reshaping and restyling an older pool so it fits the house it sits behind. Tearing out a poured concrete surround and rebuilding it in pavers. Raising a wall to level a slope that has been eating your usable yard for fifteen years. Adding a spa surround, a pergola, a fire feature, or a proper outdoor kitchen where the grill currently sits on grass.
Signs the space around your pool is due for work
- Concrete decking that has cracked, settled, or lifted at the joints
- Water pooling on the deck or running toward the house after rain
- A deck surface hot enough that nobody walks it barefoot in July
- Not enough room between the coping and the fence for furniture
- Pool equipment sitting in plain view with nothing planted around it
- Retaining walls bowing, leaning, or losing block
- Steps and paths that made sense before the pool went in and don't now
Any one of those is worth a look. Several together usually means the whole surround wants rebuilding rather than patching, and patching it twice costs more than doing it once.
Building Around a New Inground Pool Installation
If an inground pool installation is going in, the yard around it needs as much planning as the pool does. We work alongside your pool contractor and handle everything outside the shell: grading, site drainage, the deck, the walls, the plantings, the lighting, the irrigation.
Bring us in early. The single most common problem we get called to fix is a yard where nobody thought about where the water goes until after the concrete was down. Grade, drainage, sightlines from the house, where the equipment pad can live without staring at you from the kitchen window, how you get from the back door to the water without cutting through a flower bed. All of that is cheaper to solve on paper than with a saw.
We also run the irrigation, so the lines and heads get laid out around the new pool and beds instead of getting cut through six months later.
Don't have a pool contractor yet? Ask us. We have worked alongside enough of them in Essex County over forty years to tell you who shows up when they say they will.
Pool Deck Pavers
Paver choice is where a pool area either looks like it belongs to the house or looks bolted on.
We walk clients through it in person with samples, because photographs lie about color and nothing tells you how a surface feels underfoot except standing on it. Travertine stays cooler than most stone in direct sun. Some concrete pavers hold heat badly. Texture matters when everyone is walking around wet. So does joint spacing, since a pool deck sheds a lot of water and it has to go somewhere other than back into the pool or toward your foundation.
Smitty's is a member of the Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute, which is a working credential rather than a plaque. Base depth, compaction, edge restraint, and bedding are the reasons a paver deck sits flat in year twelve instead of rocking underfoot in year three.
Pool deck pavers also let you fix things later. A settled section lifts out and goes back. Poured concrete does not give you that.
Water Feature Installation and Ponds
Water is what makes people stay outside. A spillway into the pool, a waterfall coming off a raised wall, a basin near the seating area where you can hear it without shouting over it.
Custom water feature installation runs from something small tucked into a planting bed to a full koi pond with plants, filtration, and a stream feeding it. Recirculating systems, hidden reservoirs, lighting set to catch the moving water after dark. The stillness of a reflecting pool or the splash of a waterfall changes how a yard feels on a hot afternoon, and the plantings around a pond tend to become the part clients talk about most.
Ponds have their own requirements. Depth for overwintering fish, shade so the water doesn't cook, access for cleaning, plant selection that holds the edges. We build them to be maintained, not admired once and then abandoned.
Pool Landscaping
Pool landscaping is the difference between a pool in a lawn and a backyard that reads as finished.
Screening for privacy from neighbors and from the road. Beds that hold up to splash-out and salt without dying by August. Something evergreen to look at from the kitchen window in February, since you see the pool area far more months than you swim in it. Plantings sized so the equipment pad and the pool cover reel disappear.
Lighting extends the hours you use the space and makes the steps and deck edges safe to walk after dark.
Irrigation gets designed around the new beds rather than retrofitted into them
How a Project Runs
We come out and look. No charge. We walk the yard with you, listen to what is not working, take measurements, and check grade and drainage.
Design. Our design staff puts together the layout and material selections. You see it before anything gets built, and you have time to sit with it.
Scheduling. We tell you when we can start and roughly how long we need. Pool season is short in New Jersey, and the calendar fills early, so timing conversations happen honestly and up front.
Build. Same crew through the project. Site cleaned at the end of each stretch of work.
Walkthrough. We go through the finished space with you, cover care for the plantings and the paver surface, and answer whatever comes up in the first season.
Licensed and insured. Work guaranteed. Members of the New Jersey Landscape Association and the Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute.
Where We Work
Smitty's works out of Cedar Grove and Little Falls. The bulk of our pool and hardscape projects are in Essex County, with steady work in Morris County. We have taken on more Bergen County projects recently, including Mahwah and Wyckoff. Residential and commercial both.
If you think you are outside our service area, call and ask. We will tell you honestly whether it makes sense for us to take the job.
Book a Free Consultation
Call (973) 785-8483 or send us the details through the form, and we will set up a time to walk your yard.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on scope. A deck rebuild and replanting is usually a matter of weeks. A full surround with walls, water features, and new plantings runs longer. We give you a schedule during design rather than after we start.
Book a free consultation today... Take the next step
For a free quote, please call (973)785-8483 or contact us using the form below.
