Fixing a Hole

How to repair a shower that’s leaking into the laundry room below.

1. Squint up at the exposed tub enclosure from below. For a long time. Aim a flashlight up there. Mutter. Position a bucket underneath the steady drip of water and hope it’s just condensation or something. It’s been pretty humid out.
2. It’s not condensation. And it’s leaking a lot more now. Conclude, based on a “gut feeling,” that the problem is the diverter, nestled in the wall behind the shower. (IMPORTANT: Get your spouse on board with this finding. It’s definitely the diverter.)
3. Get out your sheetrock saw and start indiscriminately cutting into that wall behind the diverter. Make sure to make the hole big enough!
   
4. The diverter is bone dry. It wasn’t the diverter, you now realize. Stare despondently out the window, into the fading twilight, at your goddamned patchy yard.
   
5. And anyway, what if it was the diverter? What were you going to do about it? What, are you a plumber now?
6. It has to be the diverter. You just cut that big hole, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass to patch, and it’s not like you don’t have a million other things to do around here. Feel the diverter. Does it feel wet? Or is it just cold from the water inside? You can’t tell! Ask someone to come feel this. Say, “well, I know--that’s what I thought too, but it looks dusty and dry.”
7. It’s definitely not that kick stop drain you put in, you know that for sure.
8. Calm down, you just need to isolate where the leak is coming from. Run the tub into another bucket, so that the water doesn’t go down the drain. Run downstairs and look for a leak. Go back upstairs. Leave the tub off, but now dump the bucket of water down the drain.
9. You still can’t tell where it’s coming from. Keep putting water into buckets and dumping them out. You’re sick of running up and down the stairs now, so just yell “is it leaking?” Then, “did you say ‘yeah’ or ‘nah’?”
10. Well, it doesn’t help that there’s a huge gap between the tub spout and the wall, and that the underside of the spout is so gunked up with minerals and mold and other junk that the water is just running right down the underside and into the wall.
    
11. Wait, your daughters’ beautiful faces were like inches away from that spout when you were giving them all those baths, remember?
12. Go to the store, buy a strap wrench, and the wrong spout. They didn’t have the exact right one but you figure you might be able to make this other one work. You can’t. Go to a different store and get the right one.
13. Remove the old spout with the strap wrench. Put a fat roll of plumber’s putty on the back of a decorative ring (which you should have bought at one of those stores), and slide it over the water pipe. Put the new spout on and tighten with the strap wrench, which you’ll never use again because won’t need it for a while and when you do, you’ll buy a new one because you’ll have forgotten that you had to buy one for this project.
    
14. Put a bead of caulk around the diverter handle plate and the temperature control plates. Because you’re still not convinced that the diverter is 100% innocent in all of this.
    
15. The caulking tube says to let it dry overnight, but give your kids a bath a couple of hours later anyway. Keep asking them to not splash.
16. Leave the bucket in place for a week, because you’re still not convinced it’s not leaking anymore. But it’s not. I guess you fixed it, hopefully.
17. (Optional) Vacuum up the dust from step 4. Keep talking about how you need to patch that hole up sometime soon.

It’s just that simple!