The week I tried to regrout my shower and made it worse

Last month in Phoenix I decided to tackle the crumbling grout in my shower myself, thinking it would be a simple weekend job. Three days later I had pulled out twice as much grout as I planned and ended up with a patchy mess that looked worse than when I started. Has anyone else had a small DIY job snowball into something way bigger than you expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

martinez.paul6d ago

My grandmother always said every repair turns into two more and she was dead right. That shower grout thing happens because once you start pulling at one loose piece you see ten others that are just as bad. It's like that old rule about how every task expands to fill the time you give it but with DIY it expands to fill your whole weekend and then some.

viola_garcia566d ago

The real trick nobody talks about is that you have to check what's going on under that old grout before you start pulling it out. I stripped mine down and found water damage behind the tile that I had no idea about, which turned a $20 grout job into a full weekend of drywall repair and mold spray. That's why my motto now is to never start a grout job without a moisture meter or at least poking around the edges first to see if there's soft spots. Better to know upfront you're dealing with a monster than discover it halfway through when you're already knee deep in dust and regret.

adam1866d ago

Wait, you actually checked for water damage before grouting? I always just assumed if the tile wasn't falling off the wall I was good to go. Stripped out the grout in my bathroom last spring and found the whole bottom row of tiles just floating on rotted drywall underneath. Ended up having to rip out the bottom half of the wall, replace the cement board, and re-tile the whole thing because none of it would hold anymore. That $30 grout removal tool turned into about six hundred bucks and three trips to the hardware store. Now I check every joint with a screwdriver before I even touch the grout saw.