The Shower Was Never The Project

Series: The Shower Chronicles
Three acts of a bathroom remodel—and three different lessons about what happens when you start pulling on a thread.

[1. The Great Shower University] • [2. The Shower Was Never the Project] • [3. A Thousand Little Decisions]

Part 2 of 3: Sometimes the most important part of a remodel is the part nobody will ever see.

A renovation story about hidden problems, bad decisions, and the things nobody ever sees.

The Project That Lied

I was sitting on the porch the other evening staring at a stack of tile samples and wondering how a project that started with replacing a shower somehow turned into a lesson in structural engineering.

Retirement was supposed to be relaxing.

Nobody mentioned floor joists.

When I first decided to renovate the master bathroom, the plan seemed simple enough. Remove the tired old fiberglass shower from the 1990s and replace it with a nice tiled shower. Nothing extravagant. Just one of those upgrades that makes you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago.

In my mind, I was already picking grout colors.

The universe, however, had other plans.

I’ve noticed something about projects over the years. They never introduce themselves honestly. They show up disguised as something small and manageable. A shower replacement. A deck repair. A little landscaping. A quick afternoon job.

Then you peel back the first layer.

And discover there are six more underneath.

Home improvement projects are a lot like onions. Every layer reveals another layer, and eventually somebody ends up crying.

The demolition phase went exactly according to plan. Demolition always does. It’s the one stage where ignorance is actually an advantage. No measuring. No calculations. No trips to YouTube University. Just remove screws, pry things apart, and carry debris to the dumpster.

For a brief, shining moment, I thought I was ahead of schedule.

That should have been my second warning.

The first warning was deciding to start the project in the first place.

When the Floor Starts Talking

Once the shower unit was removed, I noticed the water lines had been run underneath the hollow shower base. Not through the wall where plumbing usually lives. Underneath the shower.

Apparently the original plumber believed in innovation.

Not a disaster, but not ideal either. I added “relocate plumbing” to the list and kept moving.

Then I saw the floor joist.

At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me. A large notch had been cut into a 2x10 floor joist to accommodate the shower drain. I measured it twice because surely no professional plumber would remove that much wood from a structural member.

Surely.

The notch represented roughly seventy percent of the joist.

Seventy percent.

I’ve purchased steaks that had more structural integrity.

I stood there staring at it, trying to reconstruct the decision-making process. At some point, thirty years ago, somebody looked at that floor joist and concluded that most of it was optional.

Then, because renovation projects never travel alone, I discovered another heavily notched joist one bay over where the toilet drain passed through.

Of course there was.

Problems are like old friends. They bring guests.

At that point I could have ignored it. Plenty of homeowners would have. The floor wasn’t bouncing. The floor hadn’t collapsed into the crawlspace. The building was still standing after all these years.

But I kept thinking about a dentist.

You don’t put a beautiful porcelain crown on a rotten tooth.

You fix what’s underneath first.

The new shower pan provided additional encouragement. During a dry fit, I discovered the floor was nearly a quarter inch out of level across five feet. Enough that water would happily gather in one corner and establish permanent residency.

Now I had plumbing issues, structural issues, and floor-leveling issues.

Nobody Volunteers for the Crawl Space

Unfortunately, all roads now led to the crawl space.

Nobody has ever uttered that sentence with enthusiasm.

The crawl space runs beneath the entire condo building, and naturally the master bathroom is located on the exact opposite side from the access opening. The ceiling is low. Fiberglass insulation hangs everywhere. Dirt covers everything else. The atmosphere falls somewhere between unfinished basement and archaeological dig.

The first task was relocating the water lines into the wall cavity.

That required two trips to Home Depot.

Only two.

Which in renovation terms qualifies as exceptional planning.

Most projects follow the Rule of Three. The first trip is for supplies. The second trip is for what you forgot. The third trip is because the thing you bought on the second trip wasn’t the right thing after all.

I consider anything under three trips a victory.

The plumbing relocation went smoothly enough. The floor joists were another matter.

I learned a new word.

Sistering.

Before this project, sistering was something nuns probably did. Now I know it’s a structural repair technique involving the installation of a new joist alongside a damaged one.

After evaluating the options, I decided to install a new 2x10 next to the compromised joist.

Simple enough on paper.

The replacement joist was sixteen feet long.

And weighed approximately the same as a compact car.

Getting it through the crawl space access opening was the first challenge. Dragging it across the entire crawl space was the second. Doing all of that while crawling on hands and knees at sixty-four years old became challenge numbers three through twelve.

When I retired from the State of Ohio, this was not part of the strategic plan.

At one point I found myself lying flat on my back in the dirt, staring at the underside of the floor, wondering whether contractors charge what they charge because construction is difficult or because nobody in their right mind wants to spend an afternoon doing this.

I eventually concluded the answer was yes.

After a considerable amount of grunting, groaning, repositioning, and conversations with myself that probably shouldn’t be repeated, I finally wrestled the joist into place.

Once secured, the floor immediately felt more solid.

Stronger.

Reliable.

The kind of improvement nobody will ever notice.

The Work Nobody Sees

And that’s the funny part.

When this bathroom is finished, people will admire the tile. They’ll compliment the fixtures. They’ll notice the glass door and the niche and whatever other details catch their eye.

Nobody is ever going to say, “Leonard, those repaired floor joists are magnificent.”

Which is a shame.

Because that’s where most of the effort went.

As I sat on the porch thinking about the project, it occurred to me that showers aren’t unique. A lot of things in life work this way. We think we’re addressing one problem, only to discover it’s connected to three others. We start pulling things apart and find problems that have been hiding there for years.

A move uncovers decisions we’ve postponed.

A health goal exposes habits we’ve ignored.

A small repair reveals something we’ve been ignoring for years.

Nobody starts a project hoping to find more work.

But sometimes the hidden work turns out to be the important work.

Someday visitors will admire the tile, the fixtures, and the glass door.

Nobody will ever compliment the repaired floor joists.

That’s okay.

The shower was never the project.

The shower was just the thing that exposed the project.

Series: The Shower Chronicles
[1. The Great Shower University] • [2. The Shower Was Never the Project] • [3. A Thousand Little Decisions]