[red-beard]

As many of you know, I'm having a pool installed. The Tile and Coping crew just can't seem to get it right, or maybe my expectations are too high.

I have a Flagstone coping and fairly standard tile. Four main problems:

#1. Flagstone: I keep finding "hollow" sounding areas in the flagstone. It appears to be separating in the interior, leading to the hollow sound. Is this normal, or am I getting bad flagstone?

#2. Hollow sounding tile. We ended up stripping the entire pool and redoing the tile. Still a few problems, but this is getting resolved. I think this was a serious installation problem. Can someone explain how it should be done so that air voids do not occur?

#3. The grouting in the tile has a lot of pinhole voids. I am guessing this is from too much air in the grout as it was being mixed. The tile repair crew came over and slather more grout on top to fill the pinholes. Is this the correct way to fix this?

#4. Several of mortar joints between the flagstones and some of the joint between the flagstones and the tile has cracked. Many of the flagstone joints, the crack follows the edge of one of the stones. It seems like the mortar didn't adhear to one of the stones. Is this "normal" or should I require these to be fixed?

I've been holding these guys to a pretty high standard. I just want to make sure I'm not being overly picky.

Thanks in advance.