Shower Repair

Six years ago, when we tiled the shower, we made a mistake. We cut the bottom course of tiles on the back wall level across, instead of following the slope of the floor. We didn't think the gap would be noticeable once we'd filled it with the Tile Shop-approved-color-matched caulk. We were wrong.

It looked good for about a month, then the caulk got dirty and couldn't be cleaned, and it's been bugging me ever since. It's clearly not been a high priority on the fix-it list, but after one of the little black diamond floor tiles came loose last month, I decided it was time to tackle the repair.

Of course, of course, once I got into it, it couldn't be just the one tile that had lost its adhesion. Nope, about fifteen of the floor mosaic tiles came up in all. But those wall tiles that had been bugging me for years?  Their adhesion was beyond solid, and I ended up tearing up the backboard before they'd come loose. Figures.

To my surprise, thus far into the project, my time and effort estimate was right about where I'd anticipated it would be - rare when speaking of my home-improvement projects. I'd only broken one extra tile, and the backboard damage was easily repaired with a coat of thin set. I was starting to feel like I might know what I was doing!

Then, I replaced the grout. Grouting is usually the easy part. It's hard to break things while grouting, and I figured, since I had all the supplies out, I could replace the grout that had failed elsewhere in the bathroom and the kitchen floors. What the heck. I got the cracks cleaned out without trouble, mixed up the goo, and troweled it into place. I'd stored the leftover grout powder from the original project in a temperature controlled space in a moisture resistant container, and it all still looked properly dry-groutish when I opened the tin, so I thought it would still be usable. I thought wrong.

I'd gotten all the work done with a single batch of grout. The next day, some of it was setting up as expected, but to my dismay, the grout in a few of the joints had instead turned to powder. What!!??!! Off to the Tile Shop I went, to see what I'd done wrong this time. They didn't have to think long at all, and told me grout has a shelf life of about three years. My bag had been sitting for six, and apparently when the stuff sits for too long, it starts to separate out, and the powdery parts just didn't have enough glue to hold together.

*sigh*

I guess the good news is that it's easy to determine which parts are OK, and which have gone bad. If you touch it with a knife and it turns to powder, that's the bad stuff. If the knife barely scratches the surface, you're good to go. And, the part where it turns to powder will make it easy to re-prep the tiles. I'm still in the dourly-glaring-at-the-mess stage of moving forward, but it shouldn't be too long before I regather my oomph and redo the bad grout.

It's a small setback, not a failure. 
Live and Learn.