Tile Installation & Repair in Cary, NC

Why a shower floor is different

People treat a cracked tile as a cracked tile wherever it is. In a shower floor, that is the wrong instinct, and it is worth understanding why.

A shower floor is not a surface. It is an assembly, and the tile is the top and least important layer of it:

• A sloped bed, which carries water to the drain
• A waterproofing layer, which is the thing actually keeping water out of your house
• The tile and grout, which are decorative and wearing surfaces

Grout is not waterproof. It never was. Water passes through grout as a matter of course, hits the waterproof layer beneath, and runs down the slope to the drain. That is how the system is designed to work.

Which means a crack in a shower floor tile tells you something a wall crack does not. Floor tile sits on a solid bed and is very well supported — it does not crack from being hit or from ordinary use. When it cracks, something under it has moved, cracked or given way.

Replacing that tile alone leaves the cause in place, and it will crack again.

Reading the signs

Three things to look for before deciding what you have:

Grout in the floor that stays dark. A working shower floor dries out between uses. One where water has got past the waterproofing into the bed stays saturated for days, and the grout shows it as a permanently darker line.

Movement. Any tile in the floor that flexes or rocks slightly underfoot.

A hollow sound. Tap across the floor. Solid, dead tapping is good. Drumminess in an area means the bond or the bed under it has gone.

Anything appearing on the ceiling below. A stain on a ceiling underneath an upstairs shower is the definitive version of this conversation.

What Cary brings to it

The established Cary neighbourhoods — Preston, Lochmere, MacGregor Downs and their contemporaries — have a lot of original bathrooms from the 1980s and 1990s.

Nothing was done badly at the time. Shower construction has simply moved on considerably, and an installation built to the standard practice of 1990 has now been in service for well over thirty years. Materials that were normal then have a service life, and a lot of them are at the end of it.

West Cary and the newer neighbourhoods are a different age entirely, and their tile issues are usually the ordinary ones: grout wear, sealant at the corners, a chipped tile.

Where we stop

This matters and it is worth being clear about.

We do: regrouting, replacing failed corner and floor-line sealant with proper flexible joints, replacing individual tiles, repairing localised areas, backsplashes, floor tile, and tiling a shower where the substrate and waterproofing are being properly prepared as part of the job.

We do not: replace a shower pan assembly where it involves the drain, alter plumbing behind the wall, or anything that requires a permit. That goes to a licensed trade.

If what you have is the second category, you will hear it at the quote, not halfway through. Knowing where somebody stops is worth more than a list of everything they claim to do.

The corner problem, which is universal

Whatever the age of the bathroom, one thing is nearly always done wrong: grout in the corners.

Where two walls meet, or where a wall meets the shower floor, the building moves — with temperature, humidity, and simply being used. Rigid cement grout cannot accommodate that, so it cracks. Then it gets replaced with more grout, and it cracks again.

Those junctions want a flexible sealant, colour-matched to the grout. It is a small detail, it is the difference between a bathroom that stops failing and one that gets regrouted every three years, and it costs almost nothing to do properly.

Backsplashes and floors

Backsplashes are the most common new tile request. The edges decide how it looks — where the run stops at an open end, how it meets a window reveal, and how outlets are cut around. Outlet cover plates need to sit flat on the tile, which sometimes means adjusting box depth.

Floors depend on the substrate more than the tile. Any deflection in the floor under the tile will crack the tile and the grout regardless of how well it is laid, so the floor gets checked before anything is bonded to it.

Matching old tile

Tile from thirty years ago is generally not still made, and even a surviving product shades differently between batches. Spares in the garage are the best answer, a donor tile from inside a vanity or behind an appliance is the second, and a knowing compromise in a low-visibility position is the third. We will tell you honestly how close a match will be.

Getting a price

Photograph the whole area and a close-up of the failure. For a shower, include the corners, the floor junction and the floor itself. Tap across the tiles and tell us whether anything sounds hollow — and say if the grout stays dark when everything else is dry.

Cary is about fifteen minutes from our base in Apex.