Shower Saga

The hall bathroom sucks. It's small and dirty. It's also our main bathroom. We've been dragging our feet on addressing the mold and mildew problem on the shower tiles for five years now, but it's time to make some progress. We'd like to tear it all out, but our budget and time are are in short supply. So... we'll make do with some spot touch up work.

Way back in July we started to do some exploratory work in a corner that had a lot of mildew. When we removed the bottom bead of silicone a whole bunch of ants came crawling out. Not a good sign! We sprayed some poison in the crack so they'd stop coming out. And we prayed. Maybe we were going to have to tear out the whole wall!

Here's a photo of area of the tube where we first removed the silicone. We suspect that the opossum nest is under this part of the tub.

The next area that we attacked was the really mildewy soap holder tray. The tiles were loose, too.

What did we find when we removed the soap insert? Not much. No dead animals in the wall. No insect hive. It was wonderfully disappointing.

The tiles pretty much just fell off the wall around the soap holder. There was lots of black mildew. We also found out that the tiles were just glued to drywall. Code these days is to use concrete board behind tiles in showers. The drywall was in moderately fair condition so we decided not to tear out the whole shower and just live with what we have until we can afford to do things right.

After cleaning the tiles and the wall area, we glued the tiles back in place. Liquid Nails makes a contact cement especially for tiles.

Here's a photo of the tiles back in place with the new grout in the seams.

And here's a couple of photos of the finished work.

We removed all of the silicone along the bottom of the tiles and replaced it with new silicone. We also removed all of the grout in the verticals of the first row of tiles and regrouted. We used a Dremel MultiMax oscillating tool to removed the grout. Very fast, very easy. The area is SO much cleaner than before.

The project took over FIVE months to complete because we just didn't have the time (or energy). It should have taken less than a week. Instead we lived with plastic hanging in the shower for WAY too long. The results are so wonderful though that we'll probably start regrouting most of the shower soon.