Broken tiles and consequences…

Last year, as I was doing the yearly full-clean of walls and ceilings around our house, as I set up one of the leg from a small ladder on the corner of a bathroom tile, downstairs, and I cracked it. 

When my wife initially noticed it and told me about it, I thought it happened during the March 18 earthquake (5.7 in Magna, near Salt Lake), but I reasoned that it was more likely to be the thin leg of the ladder. So, last week, I set up to fix the problem by first removing the large broken tile (20” x 20”). 

As I was prying it lose, I broke the tile next to it and then realized that it was sounding “hollow” and I remove that second one, I saw that it had received almost on quick set, like the first one by the way. What is likely to have happened is that the workers who installed it ran out of cement to attach these last two tiles and “spread” the little they had left far too thin. 

Thank God, I’m a pack-rat and had set aside a dozen spare tiles “just in case!” To make a long story short, I spent close to 10 hours to fix the problem, including two of which when my son came with his tile cutter and his tiling expertise (he’s done 3,000 square feet of tiling in his two houses) to help me finish off the project. 

All this to say that one little crack in one tile, has some huge consequences in terms of repair and replacement, not to mention an infestation of dust on the entire floor that has yet to be addressed. If I had to pay someone to do that small job, that would have easily run me into the $1,200 to $1,500 range!