Shower Floor FAIL

Have you ever had one of those home repairs that took you an embarrassing amount of time to fix?  Even though it affected your daily life and was a terrible eye sore?  Well this is one of those stories.  We remodeled our basement bathroom about three years ago.  

And about a year after that, we started noticing hairline cracks on the grout around the perimeter of the shower floor.  We assumed the concrete floor we had to pour to create the slope, in order for water to drain, must have settled.  But then the cracks turned to buckles and the floor began to heave around the perimeter.  Did we do anything at this point?  Nope.  We figured the damage was done and it was going to need to be replaced anyway, so it couldn't really get worse.

Until one day when one of us went to shower and it now looked like this...and it was our official signal that we needed to move out of that bathroom.   

So we packed up our stuff and moved back into the main floor bathroom.  And that's where we have been for at least the last six months.  And it hasn't been this clean since the day I took that photo.

And here's the funny part...it would have taken us less than a weekend to pull the old tile, lay new tile and grout it...but for whatever reason, we just weren't motivated to do it.  So we did what any normal DIY'er would do.  We ignored it.

Months would pass (we're talking about probably at least 6 - but we lost count) until Brent eventually made it downstairs to remove the old tile that had come loose.  It turns out that the product we used as adhesive in this area never set correctly which is what caused the tile to heave.  

He chiseled out any tiles that were loose and scraped the floor back to it's original condition.

And then we lost our motivation again.  So it stayed this way for another month or two - who knows...it could have been longer.  Somehow, Brent managed to find another surge of energy and he spent a little time laying the new tile in.  You can see a very slight color difference here, but we just felt lucky that they still sold the tile so we wouldn't have to re-do the entire floor.  Once the grout was in, we knew the new tile would blend better with the old.

And finally, another 2 or 3 months after Brent laid the tile, he grouted.  Hallelujah!  Don't think that I'm blaming Brent for this or putting the entire burden on him.  I just had a million other fires burning, which is why getting this shower in order was the LEAST of my worries.  As long as we had the one bathroom on the main floor to hose the kids off in, I wasn't concerned about having a second one in operational order.  Plus, I'm not good at cleaning, so it was kind of nice only keeping one bathroom semi-tidy for the last several months.  If we had to, we could easily get by as a single bathroom family.  But our kids aren't teenagers yet, which as we all know, is a game changer.

 Here's a bird's eye view - obviously, it isn't a huge shower - but there's room for two!  Don't worry, mom - I meant room for two KIDS...(wink, wink).

It feels so much better to shower down here, especially during the heat of summer!!  Maybe we can get used to this two-bathroom lifestyle.

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