Refurbished En-Suite Still Leaking

[Icequeen01]

Long story short, what was supposed to be just a replacement shower in our en-suite but turned out to be a full on refurb due to a slow leak from the shower which we didn't know about. Floors and walls replaced as they were rotten, pipe work checked etc. Our plumber is lovely but it is so hard to pin him down. The whole refurb took 9 weeks in the end!

We had been using the new shower for about a week when DH noticed a couple of drips on our utility room wall. When he checked above the kitchen cabinets he can see a line around 10cm where water is seeping through. Plumber has been out twice but nothing he does seems to stop it. He suggested at one point that the ribbed tiles we have in the shower are hard to seal but I'm not convinced. Next step is to take out the shower cubicle again which I'm worried will get damaged.

I could cry. We are all having to use the bath in the morning which is a pain. Has anyone else had similar problems and can reassure me it will be ok!

Ah, don't!

We had pretty much the same.

It cost us ££, as initially we didn't want to claim on the insurance.

I've kind of put it out of my mind, now as it was all a bit traumatic!

The carpet in the adjoining bedroom felt damp alongside the skirting board.

But we got a repairer in who replaced the tray and shower cubicle, and regrouted the tiles.

A few weeks later, I smelled damp in the adjoining room, so we shifted furniture and found the skirting board blown and the carpet black.

What followed including holes being made in that bedroom wall to look at the back of the tap unit; the skirting boards being taken off. Another regrout. A not very good plastering repair. Some of this was done on insurance.

We were going to replace the carpets throughout, anyway.

Few weeks later, new skirting board blown, new carpet ruined. Again.

We got ripped off by another local handyman, who was convinced it was the shower drain-pipe leaking; his investigation work included quite a few holes but we finally ascertained that the leak was coming from where the bottom of the tiles met the shower tray. As the skirting and lower 8" of plasterboard had been ripped out! There was insufficient overlap and the tray was flimsy and was bowing when someone stood on it in the shower, breaking the seal.

So, we did what we should have done on day one; we got a local, expensive, plumbing etc company in who managed to persuade the insurers that the only solution was to rip the lot out and start again.

New tray, new cubicle and aquaboard on the walls, not tiles. Repaired skirting board, complete replaster of that wall. Unfortunately the quote didn't stretch to another new carpet. Our excess was £300 and of course the loss of our NCB.

So the shower is fixed, but I still have to sand down and repaint the skirting board and do as good a repair/ replace of the 12" x 3" stain on the carpet as I can.

You have my sympathies.

We had this. The plumbers came back a couple of times to re-seal but it kept leaking. We moved house in the end 😂😂

PS the new shower tray has a lip around the two back walls, and the aquaboard sits in front of it, so in the event of that seal failing, the water has to rise high enough to get up and over the lip in order to leak.

By aquaboard, I mean a shower that looks like one you'd find in a Holiday Inn, smooth (white) plastic.

It looks perfectly okay, but the biggie is, it doesn't leak!

We also couldn't find anyone who'd reuse the existing shower cubicle.

Also, everyone said the same thing: leaking water does unexpected things. It manifests feet away from where it leaks from.

Good luck. It's horrible.

Interestingly, our neighbours in an identical house have exactly the same problem.

They're new so we saved them months of ££ and disruption by spelling out the issue and solution to them!

Oh God, that sounds awful @Miljea - even worse than ours! We estimate we have spent nearly £7,000 so far (admittedly the shower was £1200 of that). Stupidly we didn't claim on our insurance as we thought it would take forever for them to send someone out and we just wanted to get on with it. My fear is that the ceiling in the utility room will get damaged and we only had our kitchen done in January!

£7000 so far! 😳

Not sure about insurers 'sending someone out'. Leaky showers are small fry in a loss-assessors inventory. You might need 2 or so quotes. But even then, you can make 'a case' for one quote over another. No one from the insurers came out to assess our issue.

Well since posting earlier we may have had a bit of a break through! DH, DS and I spent the afternoon spraying water onto different sections of the shower wall. Eventually we managed to work out the exact point at which the water started to seep downstairs. It was higher up the wall than we thought and when we looked at the wall properly we could see some tiny cracks in the grouting that we hadn't noticed before. The plumber popped back and he agrees (I suppose he would 😀). So the tiler is coming back tomorrow to have a look and hopefully will re-grout the cracked areas. So fingers crossed for tomorrow!

Here's a photo of the offending en-suite that has caused me to go grey!

You're us way pusher than mine!

I'll try that again: yours is way posher than mine!

@Miljea - it should be bloody gold plated for the amount we've had to spend on the sodding thing! We were going to redecorate and recapped he bedroom afterwards but we are skint now so that will have to wait now.

Tiler has been back today and re-grouted so need to leave for a couple of days to dry. He's then popping back on Saturday to reseal a couple of areas and then we will try using the shower. If this doesn't work I've told DH we are ripping it out and turning it into a dressing room 😂😂

Recapped = redecorate 🙄