When Your Shower is Sinking

If you've got any home improvement plans in your future, you probably already know that winter is the best time to do them. Everything's on sale after the holidays, and then reduced even more for MLK day and President's Day. Home Depot is practically giving away everything you need to redo your kitchen.

And if you're someone like me, who will always shy away from the DIY in favor of hiring a professional, winter is still the best time b/c everyone knows contractors are busy in the summer and they'll practically be banging down your door to come work on your project.

Makes sense, right? I thought so. Except that these big box store sales are so cyclical that it doesn't even really matter when you buy your supplies. And I guess contractors don't really have a "slow time," especially not the third week of February when they're all taking their families somewhere warm for school break and booked solid through March when they return.

It's our own fault. We noticed a problem with our bathroom tiles months ago, probably before the holidays. The tile in front of our shower was bumping up in some spots and sinking down in others. The grout was coming up and the shower itself appeared to be, well, sinking. We came up with the brilliant solution of jumping over those tiles to get in and out of the shower and hoping it would fix itself on its own.

So I guess they don't make self-fixing tile? We really miscalculated that one and decided to get someone in to assess the damage. The first guy probably shouldn't be in this line of work. He was extremely worried the whole time and kept repeating how he's "never seen anything like it" and didn't want to commit himself to fixing anything. I never heard back from him. The second guy said the shower was "extremely compromised" and would need to re-tile the whole bathroom. It's not an abnormally large bathroom or anything, but I'm not jazzed about paying upwards of five grand to re-tile it. The third guy was jumping all over the floor, trying to see how far gone it was, and I don't think that's the kind of energy our bathroom needs.

We finally got a team to work on it, although they may have been tricked into thinking the problem wasn't as bad as it looked through a very calculated cell phone picture. Whoops.

Hopefully they can finish up today. Please cross your fingers and your toes and whatever other good luck strategies you have. A sinking shower is not an especially great omen for the start of 2019, but I guess it can only go up from here. Literally.