It was, we’re pretty sure, the grab bar.
The minute I used the shower this morning—there went the leak.
We rip out several more feet of tile, and spent our day looking for something we hadn’t planned to deal with for another year: the Bathroom Color Scheme. We love our swimming pool blue wall paint with white trim. And I hate unmitigated white tile.
We went to Home Depot, which has a better selection of tile than Lowe’s, and brought back several samples of Porcelain Tile That Can Be Ordered, plus some samples of some glass tiles. We found one of the orderable tiles that is a possibility; and then some (shudder) plain white that lets you do an inset of the fashionable glass tiles—and they have a blue-green in our color that will neatly inset into a tile foursome, plus a bluegreen glass bead-border that would be something else. These blaze with brilliant sea-glass-green with an iridescent finish. And I like them. The white tiles are cheap—which means we could do this jewel-inset number often enough to be impressive; and we found a nice older guy among the staff who echoes what you guys have been telling us and is actually capable of selling us things that go together: he used to do this for a living.
So…we’re not 100% sure, but we are happy with either choice. The regular tile is easier to handle, and will not tend to sag slowly down the mastic (he gave us the neat trick of nailing a board across the substrate to prevent this and using a crossed chalkline (which I did know) to get it on the square)–so—we are closer to a fix than we were.
We just did not want to do this this month!
You have our sympathy! Although the bluegreen glass tile accents sound gorgeous – would you mind taking some pictures when you’re done?
We should take them along the way, including the size hole in our wall you could fit a full-grown sow through.
“full-grown sow”
Soooo-eeee! Here, pig-pig-pig!!:D
For some reason I can’t visualize your leak.
Not particularly important as long as you can get
it to stop.
On the other hand most bathroom jobs start simple,
expose more flaws that need fixing and always cost
more than any estimated outlay.
I’ve seen some pretty big sows…GRIN
I’ve always been fond of the look of the Large White. Also very fond of their bacon.
You got that right. The leak is through tiny hairline cracks in the caulk which admitted water to the ordinary gypsum wallboard they used behind the tiles. It caused it to swell, which hairline cracked the entire section. The two original points of entry were the grab-bar and the soap dish, which let water in, bowed and cracked the wall: and the wallboard is like, well, wet sand would be a good description: no integrity whatever. A hairline crack once it gets saturation under it can wick water with amazing efficiency: the whole mess starts to live just below saturation, and leaks at any opportunity. And yep, the biggest sow you ever saw…
Use the large white only if you plan a lily motif. Uncle Tatiseigi would be happier. I like the “swimming pool blue” myself, and I think Bren would agree.
(Using dog voice)
Bad water, bad water.
Phil Brown
I dealt with a bathroom that was early-to-mid-50s with lath and plaster right next to the tiled wall. (I think they used some kind of backing behind the tiles, but I wasn’t going there.) Plaster and moisture Do Not Play Well Together. I dug out the powdering stuff and used outdoor-type vinyl spackle to fill the holes before repainting. (It still looked decent several years later when I moved out.)
If you end up using porcelain tile, keep in mind that you need some serious cutting machinery to work with it — one of those circular tile saws with the diamond blade that sits in a water bath worked well when I did it. Things that just say they’ll cut tile will probably not cut porcelain; diamond grit is generally needed.
The proper saw cuts the things like a knife through butter. The not-proper saw takes half an hour to cut an inch.
And yes, I know exactly what it’s like when water’s gotten into gypsum wall-board. Ugly.
Thank you for that. We have two outstanding candidates, one ceramic, one porcelain. I think I know which I favor. 😉
I am beginning to get deja vu here. Some years ago Lois Bujold did a major bathroom renovation, more or less “live on Baen’s Bar.” The thread grew, and grew, and grew 😉 The whole thing got cast as a skewed Evil Overlord fantasy. I recall Lois’ vignette of orcs, destroying the original, standing huddled in the gypsum dust of the fallen sheetrock. As I recall, it all started when a helpful friend, saying, “you’ve got some tile that doesn’t match here,” poked at the wall over the tub, which promptly fell down. The whole process ended up taking months…
Uh, does this mean you presently have no bath :O — or just need to take baths, as opposed to showers?
*tries to imagine a bath in a tub without a backing, and shudders*
Actually, Jane has been very clever in sheeting the sow-sized hole with plastic and duct tape. We intend to shower like crazy and turn up any additional leaks before we actually start the repair!
I’d love some blue-green glass tile, preferably the small kind we call “mosaic tile”!
White is boring but that’s what we’re having in our bathroom. Mind you, ours is a rental and if we raise the standard too much the landlady can raise our rent accordingly, even if everything was on our expense. We went with matte black floor tiles, though (named America Nebraska Black: I wonder – what’s black with Nebraska?).
I really would had loved real slate for the floor, though… and a metal slosh drain by the tub… *sigh*
We went ideas-shopping yesterday and I realised it is possible to go seriously broke on bathroom stuff. I’m holding my thumbs for your repair job staying within reason…
The latest craze in the states is glass tile. I haven’t been tempted until I saw this iridescent sort.
Nebraska Black. That is bewildering. Nebraska is cornfields and brown dust, rolling grassy hills, and a few rivers. There’s nothing black about Nebraska.
The Black Hills are in the neighboring Dakotas, (Mt. Rushmore) and are not black, either: they’re charcoal grey.
I could see Oklahoma Red, but not Nebraska Black.
Yes, that’s what’s so weird. But that’s the way it gets when a Swedish tile-maker starts naming their designs by random 😉
Not an authoritative answer by any means, but a quick google on “Nebraska black” says that the Blackshirts are “first-string defensive unit players for the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team” and “refers to the black practice jerseys that Nebraska’s first-string defenders began to wear during practice”. Maybe that’s it?
I’ll admit, when I redid my bathroom, and the plan when I redo this master bath, is to go with a stone-look tile, and a pretty insert. The last listello I did was a mosaic with travertine, porcelain tile, and glass… really pretty. And I did a pretty simple tile design… set the tiles square below the insert, and diagonal above. When you start tiling, you will learn that there are a gazillion ways you can run tile, depending on how artistic you are and how many sizes of tile you use. You may want to google “tile layout” to get some ideas. Even the boring plain white tiles can be more interesting if you do something with the layout.
Re Bathroom renovation, using cheerleader voice:
Webcam, webcam, webcam.
Phil Brown
One more option that may or may not work for you is to install one of the all-in-one continuous fiberglass tub enclosures. Without seams for the water to seep through, no leaks EVAR. Depends if you really like the idea of tile in your selection of colors, and if you feel like wrangling the existing tub out of the bathroom. There might be a whole new level of cussing in that.
I should have offered to let you shower at our place! Didn’t think of it when I talked to you. Offer is open…
btw, OSGuy & I are off to the lumber yard in a few minutes to pick up the boards for your bridge & then head over to a friend’s shop to cut ’em. We’ll come over sometime after 2:00 pm or so. Hope this brightens your day & puts an end to Murphy’s Law, squared.
Can we help? I’ve had a little experience helping my dad saw big boards…they can be cranky!
I was thinking maybe Nebraska Black from prairie fires, but I believe philosopher has hit on the reason. We also know that 600,000 or so years ago, the Yellowstone supercaldera erupted, that would have turned the prairies black, too. Oh, never mind, I’ll just curl back up in the corner and wait for my copy of Deceiver, if Amazon ever decides to ship it – they WON’T before the ship date, even though “some people I know here” have a copy and have been giving us little snippets of the first few pages…..slow torture!!!!
I saw copies in a bookstore yesterday. I’m waiting for my pre-ordered copy to arrive (Powell’s, not Amazon), so I didn’t look at more than the first couple of pages (also, I had groceries in the car).
torture? No, Joe, it’s to entice you to actually get a hold of a copy of your own. I know I will be buying one for me-self.
Deceiver is a goodie! 😆 More I will not say until June 1. 😉
@chondrite, did your library water get fixed? I hear Boston is laving some *major water problems*. 🙁
CJ-ji….hope the shower has not morphed into something more complicated. Being a home owner does make for interesting times. 😉
Thank you — the mischief had been managed. The DWS wasn’t originally sure where the leak was, so they shut down everything within half a mile or so. Once they found out which line was actually leaking, everything else got turned back on within 45 min., including the library.
The main (and new) water main into the Boston area erupted yesterday afternoon, I read in the paper this morning. They’ve apparently shut off the feed from the Quabbin resevoir and switched to some untreated, local ponds. The paper came with dire warnings that people should boil their water to drink or cook with and delicately bleach their dishwater (1/8 of a teaspoon bleach for a gallon of water: isn’t that close to homeopathic?).
I read this all with a bit of distance and amusement over the hullabaloo until I skimmed a FAQ tucked deep in the Globe, which listed the affected towns. Malden (where I actually live) was in them. Fancy that, and I drank the water yesterday evening and night without a whit of knowledge. Now I am debating how worked up I get over this. We do have some bottled water, but damned if I am going to bleach my casual cleaning of dishes. If you find me posting about gastro-intestinal uprises in my tummy, then you will know that I tempted the Fates and they are laughing back.
Watch your seals on your dishwasher, too; strong bleach will eat them up: honestly, get a big vat, boil the water, get an oldfashioned washing-pan, and do the dishes by hand. McDonald’s could start looking good after a little of this. Drink bottled. If you have iron cookware, heating them up will kill germs: it’s how our ancestors got by.
What a nightmare.
re the amount of bleach: chlorine (or chloramine, which is what they use now in water supplies, because it won’t dissociate from the water in bubbles) it’s quite lethal to microcritters; but I trust boiling more. http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/how-long-do-you-need-to-boil-water/
Basically, you need to get it above 160 for a long enough time.
You have my total sympathy.
@Raesean….I’m with CJ…boiing your water is better than bleach. The first summer we were in the woods our water came from a stream…
we boiled all our water and never had any problems. It’s a drag, but better to wash dishes by hand than ruin your dishwasher with bleach.
Actually, we do all our dishes by hand because it’s just the two of us and neither of us grew up with dishwashers (other than the animated variety). But we tend to do a few dishes under the running tap at a time rather than a formal sink load the way our mothers taught us.
Sigh… you guys don’t seem to think I can get by by relying on my cast iron tummy… Quel pain (but I suppose far less of a bother than Montezuma’s revenge). I guess I will go bowl a big pot of water and keep it on the stove for use.
Little microbes can bring down much larger critters if they get where they don’t belong. 🙂 Play it safe.
Learn to enjoy tea; it’s getting to be the season now for big vats of iced tea, or if you are from the south, ‘sweet tea’.