Quartz Pool Finishes in Lavon, Texas

Bear Creek water, hardness and quartz colors

The City of Lavon doesn't run a water system. Bear Creek Special Utility District serves most of the city, with a small part of the City's ultimate boundary in Nevada SUD, and which one serves a property depends on whose service area it falls in. Bear Creek began as the member-owned Lavon Water Supply Corporation in 1965, became Lavon Special Utility District in 2013 and took its current name in 2016; it now serves more than 4,500 residential meters.

Bear Creek buys treated surface water from the North Texas Municipal Water District's Wylie Water Treatment Plant, drawn from Lake Lavon. Its 2025 report prints the Wylie plants' figures for that year: total hardness up to 200 ppm (range 96.0 to 200), calcium up to 61.3 ppm, pH from 7.3 to 8.8, total alkalinity up to 138 ppm and total dissolved solids up to 455 ppm. Those are treatment-plant figures, not a tap sample from any Lavon address.

Dark quartz colors and hard fill water

SGM warns that hard or high-alkalinity mix water makes Diamond Brite effloresce, most of all in dark shades such as Midnight Blue, Onyx, Tahoe Blue and French Gray, and that well water or water heavy in metals and minerals can discolor it. CL Industries' data sheet for its Krystalkrete quartz asks for water kept within ±0.3 on the Langelier Saturation Index, chlorine no higher than 3 ppm and cyanuric acid from 40 to 60 ppm.

Lavon Lake, Blackland clay and the weather

Settlers came in the mid-1850s for the rich Blackland Prairie soils and the water of Bear Creek, the Handbook of Texas says; the railroad came through in 1888, and the town took the name of Lavon Thompson, son of the postmaster E. C. Thompson. Lavon Lake, built on the East Fork of the Trinity River between January 1948 and early 1953, is owned by the federal government and run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the North Texas Municipal Water District holds rights to 100,000 acre-feet of it.

On today's USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service soil map, Houston Black clay covers 74.1% of Lavon, and NRCS rates 89.6% of the city's mapped land very limited for houses on concrete slabs because the soils shrink and swell. Most of the city's stormwater flows toward Lake Ray Hubbard; only a small part lies in the Lake Lavon watershed.

NOAA's Lavon Dam station, about 3.2 miles west of Lavon's Census centre point (calculated), averages highs of 92.4°F in July and 93.3°F in August, 14.8 days a year at 100°F or above and 44.4 nights at or below freezing (1991–2020 normals). SGM keeps Diamond Brite materials and work areas between 50°F and 100°F for 24 hours before and 72 hours after the finish goes on, so a job is timed to stay inside that window.

How a quartz resurfacing goes on

1. 01

   Check before draining

   Bear Creek SUD's drought plan is posted only as a scan, and Lavon's code sets no drought or pool-fill rule, so the current stage is checked with the district first. Older parts of Lavon, mainly along Main Street and west of Highway 78, use septic systems, so ask where drained water may go.

2. 02

   Bond coat or chip-out

   On a renovation over old plaster, SGM puts its Bond Kote bond coat down first; where the old finish is chipped or sandblasted off, SGM says Bond Kote may not be needed.

3. 03

   Scratch coat, then finish coat

   SGM trowels a scratch coat onto the walls from the shady side to the sunny side, then a finish coat over the whole pool from the bowl toward the shallow end, and recommends slick troweling.

4. 04

   Expose the quartz

   Standard Diamond Brite is water-washed with brushes, one worker for every 300 square feet in a window of about an hour; NPT acid-washes QuartzScapes once it is hard enough, most often the next day.

5. 05

   Fill it and keep it full

   SGM says a Diamond Brite pool should not be drained in its first year, and that an unavoidable drain should be refilled within 24 hours.