Bathroom re-re-renovation done
Okay so here’s what was being replaced:
The wall tile was way too thick (and was poorly-installed at that), there was no bullnose around the edges, it didn’t line up with the edges of the tub, and it led to a perfect little storm of condensation trickling down and saturating the drywall in that weird little gap between the tile and the tub.
Here’s the new look:
Yeah, it’s a much less expensive finish, and it’s just thin fiberglass composite, and it’s “cheap,” but it’s actually a lot nicer, to my eye, because it’s thin and smooth and svelte, and doesn’t form a little condensation wick that will cause further problems.
As a bonus, the perfectly-smooth finish means I can also now use suction cups to mount hooks to the wall, which is a lot nicer than the crappy modified shower caddy I was using, and now I can also look into getting a wall-mounted soap and shampoo dispenser.
Sometimes cheaper is better.
I do wish it didn’t take so many revisions to get to this point but now I can stop caring about things for a while.
One somewhat annoying thing is that the worker kept on telling me over and over again that there wasn’t an in-wall leak like I thought and this work “wasn’t necessary,” but it was, just not for the reasons I thought.
Like, the last time I had to do renovations, it’s because the drywall rot was happening in the same spot and it seemed very much like the water was coming from behind the wall. It turns out that no, it physically couldn’t have been, but the only way to find this out would have been to open up the wall, and in trying to diagnose the source of the water damage I did find an actual leak behind the wall which actually did have to be fixed.
So, that leak did get fixed, as it turns out, and that was a problem, just not the initial problem that led me to find the leak.
The one really wasted thing here is I didn’t actually need a new shower head and valve and such, but the new ones are nicer than the ones I had before, and also the old faucet wasn’t even the original one installed by the shitty contractor because that had been botched too and I ended up needing to replace the faucet and the one I replaced it with also sucked, so, like. There were Problems. Now there aren’t. And the nature of the fiberglass shell is that if it does need to be replaced in the future for some reason (which doesn’t seem likely), it’ll be a much cheaper repair.
I resent that I have now spent as much money fixing the original contractor’s shitty work than I paid for the original work to begin with but now I have one less thing to worry about, and I can be a lot happier with how things are now.