Shower Tray Installation

[fixitfelix]

I was called to a customers house to look at why the kitchen ceiling was leaking water. On inspecting the bathroom above the shower tray had cracked and on ripping it out I found it had been 'bedded' with tile adhesive, which had barely touched the bottom of the tray, giving a good 4mm of travel and clearly the reason it had cracked. The floorboards had been ripped out and class 2 18mm ply used instead which was wet, black from mould and not thick enough for the joist spacing. None of the shower area was waterproofed, the amount of mastic used was astronomical, tubes and tubes of the stuff. Missing grout in the tiles at the tray join and corners has caused the regular plasterboard behind to get wet and rot out and water had been escaping in other areas such as unsealed hot and cold feeds in the floor for the bath as well as the bath waste. A non fast flow trap that did not match the flow from the shower caused water to spill over the shower tray onto the floor, a lot of which ended up on the kitchen ceiling through gaps in the floor/walls. The original builder didn't seem to agree that the bathroom needed adequate waterproofing, not just in high use areas - where it was failing anyway - but elsewhere in a room that would be fully expected to see water over the floor every day to a more or lesser degree.



To add to that almost 50% of the ceiling joists in some places had been cut away for all the services and that's right across all the joists in that room, some are like swiss cheese (a bit like the bathroom floor!) and structural integrity must have been compromised, so much so that I think an SE needs to inspect them.



I wrote a report and the original builder disagreed this was terribly substandard work. What are your thoughts? I'm posting this to try and get a balance to my report without forcing the customer to have to fork out for another guy to inspect the work. Look forward to your comments.

 

[Swwils]

Let customers insurance instruct the relevant reports.

 

[OvertonPlumber]

The whole builders doing bathrooms thing I've never understood. Just because they do it cheaper than plumbers.
I started a new job two weeks ago and we look after a lot of rental properties the quality of the plumbing is shocking.
Got called out to one ground floor flat, fairly newly fitted bathroom.
The kitchen sink waste is connected to the bath waste which has the basin waste teed into it all into a single 40mm pipe with no fall and a shallow bath trap. So guess what happens when washing machine pumps out!!
Even the other plumbers working for my company don't see anything wrong with teeing basins into shower wastepipes.
Don't they teach anything at college now days!!

 

[securespark]

I'm sick and tired of so called tradespeople who know **** all about what they're doing.

I had a shower that leaked very slowly over 20 odd years. By the time we noticed, it was well gone, the flooring was rotten, the stud wall and skirting likewise. I called a plumber to give us a quote, explaining how this shower had leaked and caused mayhem and I wanted a watertight installation for many years to come.

He wanted to use green plasterboard, wanted to lay the tray down on the floor without bedding it in silicone like Mira recommended, didn't want to use anything between the tiles and the tray except grout and didn't want to tile beyond the enclosure.

I did all the donkey work myself: laid a new P5 22mm floor, erected a new stud wall, clad it in abacus board fixed with their fixings and taped up with their tanking fluid, got him to bed the tray in, and put an Abacus L shaped sealant strip between the tray and the abacus board. He got his tiler to come in and TBF the tiler did a good job.

Then the plumber came back and fixed the enclosure.

Little did I know at the time, but a month later, we noticed mould on the lino and damp patches on skirting adjacent. Looking closely at the tile adjacent to the tray on the RHS, there was a hairline crack.

Having had enough of this clown, I booked a different plumber who came round and diagnosed clumsy installation of the enclosure. When he dismantled things, the plug in that tile had expanded and cracked the tile.

I mean, this is schoolboy stuff, WTH.....?

I got the new guy to fix stuff and it's been hunky dory since.

I also had a guy laying T and G chip who did not make sure the ends of the boards were laying on joists.

How can you charge people for work when you don't even know what you're doing?

 

[Deleted member 174758]

I also had a guy laying T and G chip who did not make sure the ends of the boards were laying on joists.

The only things I'll say about that is that some manufacturers do permit up to about 100mm or even 200mm overhang providing the other installation recommendations are followed (e.g. things like glue type, gluing T&G to joists, screw sizes and spacings, etc). Also, sometimes joints like that are unavoidable, due to joist spacing issues - in those cases the best approach I find is to go belt and braces and to add in something like 3 x 2in noggins between the joists to give the T&G joint additional support, or if the overhang is only 30 or 40mm, to add a piece of 2 x 2in or 3 x 2in CLS to the side of the joist to support the joint

 

[securespark]

Yeah, fair enough. But he didn't. I bought sh1t loads of glue and when I came home, he'd paid lip service to it and used less than 1 bottle....

 

[Deleted member 174758]

I bought sh1t loads of glue and when I came home, he'd paid lip service to it and used less than 1 bottle....

That's just plain stupid