Is your shower failing, or just ugly?

Cracked grout in a shower is the kind of thing people photograph and send me. Most of the time it looks worse than it is. Once in a while it looks like nothing and it is the front end of a real problem. One of those is an afternoon with a grout saw. The other means the tile comes off the wall.

Cracks that are usually not a failure

Where the crack sits tells you most of it. A straight line of cracked grout right in the inside corner where two walls meet, or where the wall meets the floor of the pan, is about as common as cracks get. Those changes of plane are supposed to have a flexible joint in them rather than rigid grout, because the two surfaces move independently. Somebody ran grout straight through instead. Now it is doing a job it was never able to do, so it cracks along that line.

That is a finish problem, not a waterproofing problem, assuming it gets caught before water has been running through it for a long stretch. Rake it out, put a proper flexible joint in, and it stops coming back.

Cracks that worry me

• Cracking out in the middle of a tiled field instead of in a corner.
• Tile that sounds hollow when you tap it, or that moves at all.
• A musty smell that stays after the room is dry and ventilated.
• A stain or a soft spot on the other side of that wall, or on a ceiling below it.
• Grout you already repaired once, cracked again along the same line.

Those point toward movement behind the tile, or water getting past the surface. Grout is not waterproofing. It never was. The waterproofing lives behind the tile, and once that is compromised, regrouting the front hides the evidence for a while and does nothing else. I am not telling you that is what is behind your wall. I cannot see through tile any better than you can. I am telling you what makes me want to look.

A two-minute check you can do yourself

Dry the shower out completely. Then go over the walls with your knuckles, tapping light. Tile that is bonded sounds solid and sounds the same everywhere. Tile with a void behind it sounds hollow, and once you have heard both you will not need this explained again.

Then press firmly on the tile around the cracks. Nothing should move, flex or click. If something does, quit poking it and get somebody to look. If that somebody is going to be me, there are a few photos worth sending first.

Repair or rebuild

Corner cracking, tile solid everywhere, no smell and no staining: that is a repair. Rake out the failed grout, put the flexible joint where it belonged in the first place, and you are done in a fraction of the time a rebuild takes. No demolition, no dust through the rest of the house. That is the cheap answer, and it is the right one more often than people expect.

If tile is drumming, moving, or water is showing up where water has no business being, the honest answer is that it needs opening up. Nobody wants to hear that and I do not enjoy saying it. But the other road is paying for a repair, watching it come apart again inside a year, and paying for the rebuild anyway with more damage behind the wall than there is today.

Related: Tile Work

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