What Lies Beneath

Last week we sent our Lead Installer down to Ann Arbor Michigan to do a job for a friend of the company's. Dan is one of the most precise, polite and hard working individuals you will meet. We are beyond grateful for not just Dan, but his work ethic and obsession for perfection. One thing we can always count on with Dan is that he will not only install the bathroom of your dreams, to your liking, but he will make sure that it looks perfect to him, as if it were his own. From the perfect, exact fit of the new tub, shower pan or liner and wall system, to the perfect slope for your soap dishes and shelves so water doesn't just sit on these areas.

I'm not trying to say that our other installer isn't a great installer or that his work isn't beautiful and precise, Mike does some of the nicest work you'll ever see in bathroom remodeling as well, in my opinion. Between the two, there are small differences, but none that would compromise your satisfaction. It's like any job, no one does it the exact same way as their counterpart, but the quality is the same.

Well, as Dan stepped into the home he took a look at the area he would be working in, he put down the floor runners so he wouldn't be walking all over the carpet with his boots and started to unpack his trailer of the tools he was going to need for the job.

As Dan began to pull the existing tub out he started to notice the familiar smell of mold. With many of our jobs, mold is just part of the job, so he kept moving along. After the tub was out he started on the old tile walls. The walls weren't in the worst shape, trust me when I say that we have seen really bad tile walls and this wasn't close to them. But as he pulled the first chunk of the first wall down he got a whiff of that familiar smell again and knew it was about to appear. As he tore down the walls piece by piece and got down to the structure he saw it. Behind those tile walls were walls covered in mold and walls that showed obvious stress. The entire wall behind the tile was a danger zone. Mold, has become one of the biggest, big/little problems we see in our industry.  SEE PICTURE BELOW

When many of us, well at least myself, think or hear of a situation like this, we picture a certain type of home. I always picture a home that may not be the newest or fanciest, or maybe the home is great but the bathroom is just in distress. But that's not what we had here in Ann Arbor and it's the same for many of the homes we see this in. They are very nice homes where they are kept up beautifully and the people are even great people. It's not a knock to the homeowner, it is a knock to the product that they had sold to them. I believe that I should be able to trust a product that is going into my home, especially one like a shower or tub, since it is being used on a daily basis and sometimes numerous times on a daily basis. It should hold up it's end of the bargain. 

That's one of the main reasons you will hear us and other people in our industry talk about one piece units and tile walls. It's the issue of what lies beneath.

The tile in your bathroom may look great and clean up fantastic, but if you've had any cracking or loss of tile that you just replace on your own easily, without making sure there's a solid seal, you leave your walls subject to water getting in behind the exposed area and then seeping down the wall. This, in return and as you probably already know, creates a breeding ground for mold and other spores or type of issues that can lead to rotting wood or damaged floors even. It is also this type of mold that can lead to and become black mold, which in the end will be one of the largest costs for you to cover within your home.

This also goes for the one piece shower units that we see at big box stores. If you were to get a crack on the flooring of your one piece system, or even along the walls somewhere, no matter how small it is, water can still find it's way into those cracks and areas. As I have stated already, we have seen the best and worst of these scenarios. We had an install where when we pulled the one piece tub unit, there was, I am 150% serous here, only a board left holding the tub where it was. If that board were to break, the home owner would have been dropped down into their crawl space. This is one of many situations you should look at when you're thinking of remodeling your bathroom.

In the end, as we know, you the home owner have the ultimate say so in this area of home improvement. We here at Luxury Bath by Mobility Remodelers have you and your home at the forefront of our business, it's you that matters most to us.

So when you are at home thinking of the quick fix, please take a minute, look at what you have at this time and ask yourself..."What lies beneath"