Why Does Everything Have to Turn Into a Project?

One of the items near the top of the list of things to do/fix/replace/etc to get the house ready to sell was the master bathroom. Over the years some of the grout in the shower had disintegrated to the point that several tiles were loose. So, we knew we had to do a bit of regrouting. How hard could that be?

Well, call it Murphy's Law or whatever you want, but what we had originally thought would be a relatively minor task almost immediately turned into a major project. While prodding a couple of the loose tiles with my finger, they fell completely off the wall to reveal a nasty mess of soggy wallboard hiding behind the ceramic. Doh!

Obviously a little grout wasn't going to fix the problem. The shower would basically have to be ripped out and the wallboard replaced at a minimum, and if there was water damage under the shower pan we would also have to replace the underlying subfloor as well. Then the shower would have to be replaced and re-tiled. There was just no way I could get all of that done in the timeframe we had established for getting the house on the market, so we called in the cavalry!

Enter the good folks over at American Bath. In 3 days they did what probably would have taken me 3 weeks. They totally gutted the bathroom (including the walls and subflooring), hung new Durock cement board (the original builder had apparently used ordinary drywall), installed a new shower pan and fixtures, replaced the shower door and re-tiled the shower and the entire bathroom floor.

I scrubbed everything down afterwards and my wife repainted the walls with an enamel bath paint that's a great azure shade with just a hint of lavender (it's called called "Blue Reflection" in the Behr color collection). No more of that awful, boring white we'd been living with for the last 7 years. It's all so nice and bright and shiny now! Nice!