Homeowners loathe water. And I don’t mean bubble baths and inground pools. I mean water leaks. The kind of thing that brings any project to a grinding halt… or may be the reason you start a project in the first place. For us, it was the later.
The real reason this whole project kicked off was because of the water that was magically bouncing out of the shower and onto the groutless tile. How was this happening???? I was thinking the worse…. New shower door=$$$$$
Turns out the rubber threshold under the shower door was super warped and was not blocking the shower water….
See that lovely curved line? Pardon the nastiness… it’s about to get worse.
So I removed the screws and the warped rubber piece. Moldy yuckiness. Gag.
We went to Lowes and got a door sweep kit for $10. It has the perfect amount of give to it and is just about the right size.
See the difference? Of course you do. The only thing I had to do was make some new holes in the new rubber for the skrews and cut it down to size with a exacto knife.
I thoroughly cleaned off all the mold and grossness. Then the metal piece and new threshold were screwed back on. I added a bead of silicone caulk at the top so water can’t get in gap and create more mold.
Woohoo! Look how straight and pretty. Now that the cause was fixed.. time to fix the result…
The tile.
There were actually two parts of the bathroom where the tiles were coming up. Right near the shower and smack dab in the middle of the room. When you walked into the room the tiles would actually crunch a little bit. Ugh.
On a side note – The previous owners did a little faulty DIY on these tiles – and we know how well they do DIY (#fail). They used this funky foam to adhere two tiles to the subfloor. They didn’t re-grout and clearly didn’t use regular adhesive. Now three tiles next them have come up. We are working on these three tiles and are regrouting those original two tiles.
You can see some of the water damage near the shower. Luckily we caught it soon enough that the wood isn’t soft or ruined and it didn’t seep down to the first floor. Score for us.
Steve sacrificed his elbows and knees to chisel out the old adhesive so we had a good base. I applied some adhesive and presto-chango we have a solid floor!! No crunches.
Before I started spackling and sanding the ceiling in here, the grout was a chocolate-y brown. I haven’t thoroughly cleaned it yet, but we picked the closest color match we could find.
And here we are. Solid floor with grout!
The grout isn’t a perfect match, but it works for now. The biggest thing in my mind is that water can’t get under the tiles now. This was my first time working with tile and I was surprised at how smoothly everything went. We may or may not seal the tile, since this is more or less a temporary solution.
All-in-all these two projects cost about $20. Not too shabby to make our bathroom usable again.
After all, this is only stage 1 of the bathroom re-do. We plan to re-tile eventually along with a few other bigger ticket jobs (new toilet, counter top, refinish the shower, etc).
So happy we are finally making some headway here. More to come!
~C+S
