- Okay, so we're here in
their master shower here,
in their bathroom
and I believe that there's a leak
probably coming from their bench here,
'cause it's dripping down below
on the floor below.
So I'm lookin' here.
You can see some ridiculously useless
attempt that somebody had done in the past
to try to seal this up.
This is a lesson on how not to do it, folks.
So if you came here looking for a how to video,
we're gonna show you how to,
but we're also gonna show you how not to,
and this is how not to.
(pop music)
This has gotta be
the most stupidest thing
I've ever seen in my life.
We're gonna do this the right way,
we're gonna take this apart.
Look at the mess these guys left.
Just gobs of...
Who does something this unbelievably stupid
and thinks they're gonna collect a paycheck
at the end of the day for this?
If any of my guys had done this for me,
I'd be like, I'm not paying you.
Good luck, later.
So you can see right here,
look how big this gap is.
So whoever made this little overlay bench here originally,
did the world's worst job of placing it down on there,
'cause it doesn't even look like it was sealed very good.
We're gonna fill it up with some silicone caulk.
Alright, so here we're just gonna...
See, this shouldn't have come up this easy
and it looks like they just
filled the inside of this with foam,
which I don't see what the heck
that's supposed to do for you,
that doesn't buy you anything.
What they should have done was sealed it
when they put this down,
so we're gonna have to scrape all of this off
and maybe put some Thinset down
or I might even use a sanded siliconized caulk
to just glue this thing down
and once we glue it back down,
we'll come back with all the corners.
We'll hit all the corners with white silicone,
which is what you're supposed to use.
You are not supposed to use latex, folks.
You are only supposed to use what says
tub and shower.
But I prefer just good old fashioned
pure white silicone
and wherever you have a change of plane,
all these areas here is where you put it.
And underneath here.
I don't feel a drip edge underneath here.
Apparently the water would hit here
and come in underneath
and just work its way through this gap.
There's about a quarter of an inch gap here,
that this thing sits on.
And probably 'cause whoever the bozo was
that put this foam on here,
all they did was elevate the shelf up
so now they've left a huge gap.
Not too bright.
We're going to fix that now.
Alright, so this is the metal plate
that we pulled outta here.
As you can see,
they usually use just a metal stud here.
Very thin gauge metal.
See all the rust all over it?
This is how much water
has been on this thing over the years.
And it's already just eroded
down to nothing right here.
And then we're gonna take a look inside here.
Here's what it looks like down in there.
You can see all the rust everywhere.
Just piles of disintegrated metal
in everything down there.
And we think that the leak
was probably right there,
in the center of the screen there.
We're gonna go drill a hole from below,
where we saw the leak
coming through the floorboards.
And we're gonna see if that's the spot.
If that is indeed the spot,
then we'll know that this is where
the source of the leak was,
but I'm pretty sure that this is it.
And once we caulk everything back up here,
we're gonna make this look nice and pretty.
Scrape off all this yuck
that the previous
handyman, for lack of a better word,
put on here.
Things are gonna look very nice when we're done.
(water dripping)
okay, so what we are looking at here now
is the solution to our problem here,
for underneath the bench,
so I've built this little
support structure here.
And this is just like a studded wall,
where this would be the bottom plate.
These are your four studs
and I have a top plate,
and this will get screwed onto
the top of these, like that.
Then we have plywood that's gonna go
across the front of this,
to support the forward face of the bench.
Then a piece of plywood will go along the top here,
to take up the entire cavity space that's here,
where this will sit into.
We will actually drill this into the subfloor
by putting screws right here
in these cavities here.
That will secure this structure to the subfloor.
Once we get the plywood on top here,
we are going to Thinset down on top of that,
the top of the bench.
Here is what the final piece looks like
with the wall already screwed into place here,
that I put this panel here.
That really makes things nice and secure.
Now we're going to lower
this entire apparatus here
into the cavity for the bench
inside the shower,
and we'll screw it here, here and here
onto the subfloor.
Here we are,
we've put the wood apparatus
inside the shower bench there
and if you look at the bottom there,
you can see in each one of these cavities,
we've put a few screws down there.
So this thing is now secured
pretty well to the floor here.
Just gonna do a mock setup here.
We are going to add a top plate
and this will get screwed down.
Then we have this piece of plywood here,
and that's gonna get screwed down as well.
You can see I cut off the tops of the studs
so that they're all slanted,
so that our bench top here
will sit at an angle
and water will drain off of it.
That's the proper way to do it.
I made it a little more of an angle in this case,
simply because of the poor design of this shower
and the way it was built originally by the builder.
We wanna make darn sure water drains
and drains good.
So then our marble shelf here
will sit on top of that.
We're gonna be putting Thinset down.
You know, Thinset mortar.
Like they do with tiles.
And we're gonna tile it down
and as you can see,
this is the thing here.
But you're still going to have this gap
and that's just all the way
that it was designed.
You can't get the thing to lay flat on it.
It was the way they built it.
We are gonna fill this crack in here.
We're going to fill that in
with a sanded siliconized caulk.
But anyway here, you can see how
it's at a little bit of a slant here.
The reason why this is a bad design,
we've pointed out before,
is you never wanna have the shelf
come up against the wall like this.
In front of it.
Because now you're gonna have
an upward facing grout line
which water's always gonna get down
and get behind it and get down to the floorboards
and leak down below.
Nothing we can do about that
unless we remodel this entire bathroom,
so what we're going to do is,
we're going to put sanded siliconized caulk right here.
We're gonna lay it in nice and thick, too.
So that it will fill in the entire crack
and it will be nice and solid
and this whole thing will be cemented down
and we hopefully will never see another leak here.
This would be a perfect time
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Well here we are,
back in the master bathroom.
It's been overnight,
we have let it dry.
What we did was we back buttered the bench top here
with the Thinset mortar
and we also troweled on
some Thinset mortar beneath it.
On top of that wooden substructure that we made.
So now... (knocks on tile)
Rock solid, you can hear it.
It's completely rock solid all the way across.
So this thing is now down
and now what we have to do
is we gotta put that siliconized caulk
into these cracks
that I mentioned to you earlier.
We're gonna run it all the way
up the walls as well,
for continuity.
And run it down here.
And don't forget,
this is the part everybody forgets:
the underneath part.
Even though we kind of
squeegeed in some Thinset in there
to help block those holes,
remember that the Thinset mortar is porous.
So we have to put silicone there as well.
That's a step that many people overlook
because that's out of sight,
out of mind.
We still have to clean off
this whole area here
and we're gonna just re-caulk this entire area.
This whole shower was never built right
by the builder to begin with.
Look at this gap.
What kind of idiot leaves a gap that big
when they're building a shower?
That's just completely moronic
the way they designed this thing
and implemented it.
I'm almost embarrassed for the builder.
And they made such a mess here,
in this corner here,
when they originally gooped it all together,
but we have to clean all of that up
and we're going to make it look just perfect
with beads of silicone.
Well if you're looking at all this lovely pin striping
and you're wondering,
hey, what is all this?
And you put it right in the corners here,
because it gives you nice, straight edges
all the way up.
So if you've ever seen people
that try to caulk the showers,
over the years it gets real sloppy.
Like they'll have it comin' all the way over here
and all the way over here
'cause they don't know how to tool it.
And usually it's because they squirt out
too much of it
and when they try to tool it flat,
it just snow plows off their finger
and goes all over the place.
But if you use this blue tape,
it gives you perfect edges
and you don't have to worry about
what mess you're makin'.
You just come in
and you just go right down the line
with the tube like this.
Then when you're done,
you just come right back down the line
with your finger and then you got perfect edges.
If you look here
at some of these corners here,
what I've done...
And let me show you,
a lot of this has to do with
this foolishness right here
I pointed out earlier from the builder.
Look at this, see that pushes in.
This says to me,
the builder was so stupid
that they didn't even put any support
behind these panels here in the shower.
They were relying strictly on these perimeters
to support 'em and you can see over the years,
a number of people have tried to fix this.
But the problem is,
they were using improper technique, improper caulk.
I'm coming in now with the perfect solution for this,
which is a siliconized caulk that has sand in it,
so it's a sanded, siliconized caulk
and this is color matched usually
to whatever grout you make.
What's perfect about this is when you grout tile
and if you're tiling up the wall
and you grout and you put this caulk in,
it would be matched completely.
It's made by Mapei.
I use their grout and I use their caulk,
so it matches absolutely perfect
and you can't tell the difference.
It looks just like caulk.
The caulk looks just like the grout when you're done.
Because of this,
you can see what I've had to do.
In order to be able to seal these holes here,
that they've left,
these wide gaps,
you gotta give the silicone
something to grab onto on both sides,
so I've backed off an eighth of an inch.
So all the way around here,
you can see wherever I wanna go here,
I've backed off an eighth of an inch on this wall,
and an eighth of an inch on this bench here,
so that I'll get a nice concave edge.
That's what you want; a nice concave edge to your caulk,
so that the water hits the wall,
goes down the concave edge and comes down the bench.
Anywhere you have a change of plane,
you wanna get a good concave shape there.
You don't wanna just have
a little line of caulk
filling a crack like this.
And then you have little gaps
in that filling along the bottom
and that's why people ran into problems here.
We're going to calk this in right now
and you'll see when we're done
how much better it is.
By the way, when you use blue tape
or use any kind of tape
to help caulk your edges,
always pull the tape off
immediately after you caulk.
The reason is,
especially with the silicone,
it starts curing within a couple minutes,
so if you wait more than five, ten minutes,
you're already gonna be in trouble
and you're gonna see
it's peeling right back out with you.
You wanna peel it off immediately,
as soon as you tool it in with your finger.
So let's get started.
Alright, so this is the product
that we're using here.
Again, like I said,
this is made by Mapei
and I'm using the biscuit color,
which is pretty much as close as I can get
to this wall here.
This is what they call the Keracaulk S.
The S means it's sanded.
Make sure you get the right stuff,
'cause you'll see Keracaulk U.
That means unsanded
and you do not wanna get unsanded
for this application.
In the shower here, I prefer to use sanded.
It gives it a lot more strength
and the sand provides, I think,
a little bit more imperviousness
to the water that might try to leak in anyway.
And you can see I gave it
a little bit bigger hole than I normally cut.
Simply because we're gonna glob this stuff
into these big, thick channels
that I've already taped off for ya.
Normally, when I cut my caulk,
the tip of the nose there,
I usually make it as small
as I can possibly get it
and still fit the little poker
from the caulking gun
into the thing there.
And the reason is...
Normally, less is more
when you're doing corners and stuff,
or any kind of caulking along the edges.
It just looks a lot more professional
when you can lay down a nice,
thin bead of caulk there
and just tool it down and it looks really good.
We're gonna go ahead and get this into place.
We've started up in the corner
and we're just gonna
work our way down the edge here
and this is why we can make
as much mess as we want.
I'm gonna stop there,
just to do that little bit, to show you.
We can make as much mess as we want
because we've got the tape there.
We're just gonna come in and tool it down
and when we're done in a couple minutes,
we're gonna peel all the tape off
from all the spots that we've done.
Alright, so we've completed
putting the caulk in
and you can see that...
Some amateurs might make it look like this
on their wall normally, right?
By having this tape,
it allowed us to be a little sloppier
than we normally would be.
Now that it's all been applied,
and this only took a couple minutes
to do all of this,
we're gonna peel off this tape
to reveal our edges.
Okay, so here's the first piece coming off.
See how it's staying nice and straight
all the way down there?
It's looking nice and professional
on this side, anyway.
Once we peel all the tape off,
we'll see how it looks.
You may have to come back
and retool a little bit, too.
Here, you can see we've pretty much
got all the tape off.
We're looking at some pretty crisp, clear lines here.
This was a successful patch up.
We're going to let it dry overnight
and we have to do a water test tomorrow
to make sure that no water
gets anywhere past any of these seams.
I suspect, because of the size of this gap here,
you can see there's still some areas
that we couldn't quite get full.
We're going to have to come back
with a second coating up in there.
We're gonna tool this down a little smoother.
We have to put a second coating in there
just because that gap was so large.
Most caulk won't handle
more than a quarter of an inch gap
and on this right side here,
it was over a half inch to begin with.
We got lucky it even covered that much.
We'll have to come in and fill the rest
with a second coating
once this dries.