Oozing Tiles

We should have known our Home Inspector was way too cheery. He walked around our house telling us that everything was an easy fix. When he came to the master bathroom shower stall with it's brown, mildewy tiles he said, "A little Tilex should clear that right up."

We now know that that isn't the case. When Kevin went to clean the shower he sprayed Tilex and started to wash down the tiles and a brown ooze began to seep out from behind. Kevin wisely stopped.

When my Dad came down and took a look, he started tugging on the tiles and they popped off of the wall. The grout had failed and the cement board behind the tiles was rotted. It would have been nice to know this before we bought the house! Our master bathroom is now a serious construction site.

My Dad assigned Kevin the task of taking a utility knife and scraping the mildew off of the back of the tiles, so that we can reuse them. (Apparently, it's very difficult to match tiles...) If you're imagining this to be a completely disgusting, grimey job, you're right. I'm just glad he didn't ask me to do it. Our half of an hour of television every night is filled with [scrape, scrape, scrape] followed by "Kevin that hit me in the face!" Fortunately for Kevin he wears goggles to work on the tiles, unfortunately for me, sitting 4 feet away isn't far enough.