Tom's Blog

Several weeks ago we discovered we have rather significant water damage in our downstairs bathroom.   Pictures of this ongoing adventure can be found here:  Bathroom Repair For Programmers.

Tip #1:  Don't put off dealing with visible signs of water damage, even for a microsecond.

Tip #2:  Check behind plumbers to make sure they actually fix things.

Last year (I think?) we started to see water spots on the linoleum in the bathroom, and we got a plumber to look in the crawl space under the house.  He said he fixed some stuff around the bathtub drain, and then we figured it was all taken care of (at least I did).  Wrong.  New water spots on the floor appeared, and seemed to be spreading more than ever.  I actually thought it must be mold or something and not more water, because we had had a plumber under there and he fixed everything, right?  Wrong.  The floor started to noticably buckle and it became impossible to ignore the fact that something major was still wrong.  We finally looked under the house ourselves and found water leaking down around the toilet drain and what looked like pretty bad damage to the sub-floor.

Tip #3:  Turning off the toilet valve doesn't stop wax ring leaks.

We shut off the valve on the downstairs toilet immediately.  A few days later it dawned on me that shutting off the water wasn't enough -- the water in the tank and bowl would still be merrily leaking away.  So I drained all that water out to stop the source of the leak.

I figured it was probably the wax ring (what else could it be?), so I did some research (here) and decided to replace it myself so we could at least have the use of the bathroom again.  It sounded pretty straightforward:  Remove the two screws holding the toilet to the floor and tada, it comes right up.  It's actually a lot easier than it sounds.  Anyway, I bought a new wax ring for $3 and removed the toilet, thinking this would be a relatively quick and easy workaround until we could deal with repairing the floor later.  Then I started poking around on the floor under the toilet.  The more I poked, the more ghastly it became.

The entire floor under the linoleum was waterlogged and rotten.  It was like having a floor made out of a wet sponge.  There would be no workaround for this -- it would simply have to be fixed before the toilet could be re-installed.  In retrospect, it was pretty miraculous that the toilet (or one of us!) hadn't fallen straight through the floor.

How could this have happened?  There are really only two possibilities I can think of:  Either the wax seal just spontaneously developed a leak, or somebody broke it.  Our house originally had wood flooring everywhere, including the bathrooms.  At some point before we moved in (5 years ago), someone put linoleum over the wood floor in the bathrooms.  One of my theories is that the wax ring developed a leak when the toilet was put back in place over the new linoleum, and it's been leaking slowly ever since.  That is kind of a long shot, though, because our home inspection didn't indicate any damage like this before we bought the house.

At any rate, the damage is so extensive I figure it must have been happening for years:  The damage goes through the linoleum, a layer of masonite beneath that, a layer of wood flooring beneath that, and the sub-flooring beneath that, over a huge area of bathroom floor -- and the neighboring dining room.

At this point I figured that whoever eventually fixed this problem was going to have to tear up the old floor regardless, so I just started doing it myself.  As Spock would say, "It has always been easier to destroy than to create."   I was able to explore the full extent of problem, and, if nothing else, it might save us a few bucks if/when we hire somebody to repair it.  So far I've removed the short wall, the vanity, the tub/shower combo, and big chunks of floor in the bathroom and dining room.  (We probably didn't need to remove the tub to repair the floor, but we figured this was an opportune time to get rid of all the Harvest Gold in the bathroom.)

After tearing all this stuff out, I can't figure out why the original plumber did anything to the bathtub drain.  That area looked fine to me.

Tip #4:  Call your homeowner's insurance agent right away!

We tried to call in our insurance agent to see if they could help.  They can't.  They only cover "sudden" water damage; they don't cover "seapage" -- anything that has been happening over a long period of time, and the guy said it was pretty obvious our damage had been occurring for quite a while.  This news in particular led me to think of ways to save pennies on these repairs.

Tip #5:  The contracting industry has horrible customer service practices.

Now what?  I'm not an expert of course, but after tearing everything out, it's pretty clear to me that four main things need to happen during the repair process:

• Repair (or replace!) four or five damaged floor joists.
• Repair about 5-6 feet of damaged header joist.
• Repair about 5-6 feet of damaged sill plate.
• Repair about 4 feet of sole plate on the exterior wall.

Those things are a little out of my comfort zone, so we've been trying to call in several people to evaluate the damage and give us some estimates.  Unfortunately, so far the prospective contractors either don't show up or don't return our calls.  One outfit who shall remain nameless (*cough* James Poe *cough*) literally didn't bother to call or show up after I took off an hour of work to be there when they arrived.  Needless to say, they were crossed off the list.

So that's where we stand here on this Fourth of July weekend.  Let this be a lesson to you:  Don't mess around with water damage.  Unfortunately, I'm not so sure our situation would have been much better if we'd tore into the floor the moment we saw the first water spot on the linoleum.  I remain convinced there would have been significant damage even then.  Which would mean we had absolutely zero indication there was a problem until it was already too late.  Stupid wax rings.

On the plus side, we'd always wanted to replace the fixtures and linoleum in the bathroom anyway.