The new shower recess back when it was first built twelve months ago

The shower recess seems to be in the process of disintegrating. I have never seen that happen.

I know there are a number of things to cover and I will do that in the next post but this is quite unusual and in a way is in keeping with everything else that is going on with the house.

It is so soft that the weight of the tiles have caused it to squeeze out from under the tile

About three days ago I noticed some white lumps of something on the floor of the shower cubicle. I put it down to the fact that there were still a few pebbles of the material used to hold the tiles. I thought the cleaner must have knocked them off.

I have not been having a lot of showers over the last few days as you would know. I have been unwell and the effort of getting into the shower can be a bit much if it isn’t urgent.

Yesterday I was in the shower prior to heading off to hospital again and noticed the white lumps were dissolving in water. That should not have been happening.

I looked more closely and could not identify them but then noticed that the same stuff was being squeezed from under the tiles all around the shower hob. I touched one of the tiles and it slid as though it was on whipped butter rather than glue. The tiles all around the hob were slightly displaced and some were even cracking from the movement.

We had an inspection a few weeks ago and nobody saw anything. A community services worker has cleaned up the shower at least once since then and seen nothing. The shower was spotless a week back but in the photo to the left and other photographs there is black matter which looks like mildew around the tiles as well. I have never seen anything like this happen to a house.

Let me take you on a trip to an immensely nutty place I live in at times. Every now and again I wake to find the world I thought I was living in is not the world I am actually living in. Over the years that feeling has become quite pronounced and one theory I toy with at times is that I am slipping across the border into ALMOST identical planes of existence. It is just an idea but stuff like this goes a long way towards assisting to make that possibility into a firm belief! Another idea that seems more likely is that this is hell and the little bastards who run the place are so sick of me they do not even bother to keep the continuity that forces one occurrence to blend into the next!  Whatever.

The white matter and the cracked tile that alerted me to a problem

I photographed as much as I thought I needed to and sent an email off to the Ray White real estate agents so they could inform Dennis Mentis.

You may wonder why I would do them the service when they have been so vindictive towards me. Well, this is quite serious damage and it needs to be dealt with. I leave it to them to wander about full of resentment and whichever plane I am on there are things that people should do when something goes wrong with someone else’s stuff.

Dennis has never been back to replace the curtain rails around the shower! I have had to mop the floor dry every time I have used the shower since he “fixed” it. The floor has been faithfully mopped every time the shower has been used. If I cannot cope with mopping the floor (and I often cannot) I do not use the shower. The shower is inches from the toilet and the tiles were sloped the wrong way when the place was built so the toilet sits in a small lake for days if I do not mop it up. That means my trousers get wet if I sit on my throne and my slippers get soggy if I stand to salute so mopped it must be!

I have to mention it as the lack of a shower curtain and standing water will come up as a cause of the damage. Yep, it is that boring.

The original rebuild of the shower recess was done almost exactly twelve months ago. Dennis had brought the house and been made aware that the showers in both apartments leaked badly and were in danger of affecting the value of the building. He told the tenants to be ready for a visit from him that would last a few days while he rebuilt the shower recesses. It was about eighteen months later that he came to build the recesses and he and a few friends did it over a weekend

The corner showing where the material has expanded and pushed the tiles apart