Some of our clients are people that just purchase their new home and started using their shower. Next thing you know tiles are popping, grout is cracking. Other times floors are bowing and flexing right underneath their feet. We’ve been getting more and more calls about this type of situation. Unfortunately some of these calls are for brand new showers and the contractor used isn’t answering phones calls for warranty, etc.
We try to come in and do the repairs while minimizing the amount of demo. We start with the shower floor, and the bottom of the walls in order to find the problem and the amount of damage created by the water on the substrate. With that information we’re able to decide how much deeper to go into it, whether we need to replace substrate & framing or just repair and waterproof and install new tile.
Most people think that a shower floor repair is a simple inexpensive repair where simply tiles need to be replaced. In truth water damaged tiles are indicative of water pooling in the substrate below the tiles. This issue is caused by an incorrect slope, incorrect placement of the drain, incorrect insulation of waterproofing system.
A crucial piece for these scenarios is that the client must have extra tile that was used for both the shower walls and the shower floor. Otherwise we will definitely see the change in color/pattern, etc. Some clients take the opportunity to do a new tile as if it was meant to be that way design-wise.
If you were to just decide all together to do a full on Reno please check our other article for that information here. We use a variety of products to do our shower systems. Some of them consist of Schluter and Wedi
Take a look at some of the jobs where we’ve had to do these types of things below:
