Paver Colors

Chris and I have finally decided that we're going to pay someone to do something around our house.  Amazing!  We're such the do-it-yourself type of couple, but when it comes to our pool deck, we think leaving it to the professionals is probably best.  With removing the cap tiles on the pool, installing a new drain, and leveling out our non-level pool deck so water doesn't puddle, it all just seems a bit much and a bit overwhelming to go the DIY route with this project.

Just as a reminder, here's what our pretty in pink (!) pool deck looks like now:

We met with five different contractors to get quotes on how much this project would set us back.  It's our first big project, financially, at this house, and we've really been wanting to do it since we moved in in April of last year!  Getting multiple quotes definitely helped us make our final decision on who we're going with.  Of course, making sure every contractor was licensed and had a good rating with the BBB was essential, but we also managed to get the contractors to bid against each other.  This left our final (fixed) price at 1200$ less than the first price we were given.  Thank you negotiating skills (I somehow hear that weird Priceline Negotiator song in my head right now).

So after a few weeks of getting various people out here and negotiating, we had to pick out our paver color.  Easy, right?  Not so much for us...there are a million to choose between.  We both have commitment issues when it comes to home improvement projects that are pretty permanent, and we're both pretty indecisive too.  I'm not real sure how we have such a great marriage and knew that we wanted to be with each other for FOREVER, but that's another story for another day.

Back to the paver colors...

When we met with our contractor to decide on colors, he had an assortment of colors to choose between...

Grey Solids
Natural	Charcoal	Dark Brown
Dark Orange	Tan	Taupe
Red

White Solids
Sandstone	White	Coral
Salmon	Goldenrod

Grey Blends
Heritage	Santa Fe	Ortega
Rustic	Driftwood	Granite
Coffee	Redwood	Burnt Oak

White Blends
Oakrun	South Beach	Cappuccino
Riverwood	Old Chicago	Sierra
Sand Dune	Mahogany Ash	Timberwood

That's a lot of colors, right?!  We did decide that we wanted a blend of colors to add dimension to our pool deck, but that still left us with 18 different color choices to choose between.  Because these are going in the pool deck, I wanted a light and airy color, so that eliminated our grey blend category and left us with the white blends.

White Blends
Oakrun	South Beach	Cappuccino
Riverwood	Old Chicago	Sierra
Sand Dune	Mahogany Ash	Timberwood

After driving around and looking at people's pool decks in a new construction area, we snapped a few pictures of the one we finally decided on this weekend and sent it over to our contractor.

Sorry that the image quality isn't the greatest.  The owners weren't home, and I wasn't taking the liberty of going through their screened in area to get a picture.  This was taken at the edge of the new construction house currently being built, through the screen.  

Our contractor told us that our winner color was...

Sand Dune

We had a sample of the Sand Dune color, so we took picture of that and compared side by side and decided he was correct!

So hopefully within the next month or so, our pool deck will go from looking like this:

 to this:

What do you guys think?  Have you guys had any paver decision woes like us?  Please share!