Two Major Financial Set Backs

This summer has been rough on us financially. First, we realized we could no longer put off repairing the leaky shower pan, so endeavored to take on the work ourselves. Then we had a pet emergency that blew most of our emergency savings.


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The leaky shower pan was an annoyance that I knew had to be taken care of, but I kept putting it off for fear of what I would find—with good reason. Turns out our bathroom floor was about an inch out of level from one corner to the other & our shower floor mirrored that. (Translation: all the water ran to one corner of the shower pan, where the shower membrane failed.)

The former owner redid the entire bathroom (floor and all), but managed to cut so many corners that it makes my head spin. After removing the glass enclosure and tearing out the tile and mortar bed, we discovered that the membrane had a huge hole in it. Pulling up the membrane revealed rotten sub floor, rotten joists, and rotten 2x4 ledges. PLUS the 1 inch drop in the floor.

(Note: when we bought the house, the former owner was supposed to have fixed the then leaking shower pan. We had an inspector come out three times. After the third time, the leak had stopped. We now realize that he didn't actually fix the shower pan, he just kept sealing the surfaces until it appeared no more water was leaking.)

This is what we uncovered—that dark area? I could poke my finger all the way through. So not good:

After tearing up the sub floor under the shower, I found lots of rot in one of the joists. I had to scrape it out, sister it with 2x8 frames, then fill the gaps with a wood-filling medium made for rotten sub floors.

I then had to deal with the 1 inch discrepancy. Using all of my Tetris-honed skills, I shimmed & glued until all was level. Then put the sub floor back in, making sure to caulk and paint water-proofing membrane over everything.

New sub floor & curb with water proofing and caulk

We got a new membrane in, "poured" the mortar bed, and retiled.

Membrane installed with Quick Pitch and Kirb Perfect guides. (The former owner had screwed hardy board into the inside of the curb and through the membrane, causing a number of spots that leaked.)

Mortar bed packed and drying

Cement board screwed into place, water-proofed, and taped

New and old tile back in place

And after all of this work, we discovered that the glass door no longer fit. It was cut for a sloping curb and floor, not a level one. So, even though we saved thousands of dollars doing this ourselves, we're now going to have to shell out almost $1,000 for a new glass enclosure (because it's a custom size).

It cost us about $1,700 in materials to do this ourselves. That included buying a new hammer drill to take up the old tile and mortar bed, more expensive floor tile, and a new (fancier) rain shower head. Estimates (before the rotten sub floor discovery) for someone to come in and do the work for us were in the $3,000-$5,000 range.

We're still waiting on the custom glass door—but we would've had to have gotten a new door no matter what.

What we thought would take us a week to finish took us three (not including the shower door install).

And just a couple weeks after that, we had to take our 17 year old cat to the emergency vet (which ended up costing more than our shower install). She's fine now—no idea what was wrong with her, but we ran every test under the sun to try to figure it out—you know, like you do.

Just goes to show, that no matter what, shit happens & it's just best to deal with it when it does. Thankfully, we had money in the emergency savings account. But now we have to start that account from nearly scratch, again.