Tile is a finish. It is hard, it sheds most of what hits it, and it will happily let water past at any grout line, any corner, and any change of plane. Everyone learns that about grout eventually. What matters is that the assembly behind the tile was built on the assumption that water would get through, because over a long enough stretch of years it always does.
A modern wet wall is a system: framing, a backer board or bonded foam panel instead of regular drywall, a waterproofing membrane lapped at the seams, corners treated with banding, and a drain that ties into all of it correctly. Get one connection wrong and the rest of the system does nothing at that spot. Water is patient and it only needs one opening, so the difference between a good installation and a bad one lives entirely in details you cannot inspect later.
Waterproofing is a small share of a shower and the largest share of its risk, which makes it a strange place to save. What actually moves the number here is area and detail: how much wall gets tiled and how high, whether there is a niche, a bench, or a curb to detail, and how complex the tile layout is, since any pattern that is not a straight grid means more cuts and more time. Then there is what demo turns up, such as rot at the curb, a soft subfloor at the drain, or framing that has to be corrected before anything can be bonded to it.
No. Sealing grout slows staining and makes cleaning easier, and it is worth doing. It does not make a shower watertight, because grout was never the water barrier. If the membrane behind the tile is compromised, nothing applied to the surface will fix it from the outside.
Look outside the shower rather than inside it. A soft spot in the floor at the threshold, a stain or bubbled paint on the ceiling of the room below, one specific corner where tile keeps loosening, or a musty smell that never clears. Those are the tells, and they usually appear long after the leak started.
Grout and caulk are maintenance items, not permanent. Hairline cracking at inside corners and along the floor-to-wall joint is common, because those planes move slightly against each other. That is why corners get caulk instead of grout. Persistent cracking in the middle of a wall is a different signal and worth having someone look at.
Older Utah homes often have them: a thick mortar bed over lath with a pan below, built by people who took the work seriously. Many have lasted decades. They are still a service-life item, and once the pan goes, the assembly comes out rather than gets patched back together.
Everything comes out down to the studs, which is the moment the house tells you the truth. Framing, plumbing, waterproofing, ventilation, and finishes get rebuilt in sequence, and the room stays out of service until that sequence finishes.
Learn more →The most common request we hear. The tub comes out, the shower grows, and the real work happens at the drain and in the floor framing below it. The tile you pick matters far less than that.
Learn more →Low thresholds, solid blocking behind the walls for grab bars, and enough clear floor to turn around in. Done early and done right, none of it has to read as medical equipment bolted to a normal bathroom.
Learn more →Small rooms are not cheap rooms. Every cut, every fitted piece, and every detail happens by hand in a space where nothing is standard, so the labor stays high even when the material list stays short.
Learn more →A few details about the room and the house is all we need to start. Or call 801-644-9000.