The shower that was resting on skirting board

The call was one we get several times a year. A bathroom fitted eight months earlier by another firm, a brown ring on the kitchen ceiling below it, and an original fitter who had stopped answering the phone.

Above the floor, the bathroom looked fine. That is what makes slow failures cruel: the visible work is the easy part. When we opened the floor, the shower tray turned out to be bedded on offcuts of skirting board rather than a solid base. Every time someone stood in the shower, the tray flexed a fraction of a millimetre. Eight months of that had opened the seal, and the water had been finding its way into the void ever since.

We dried the void, replaced two joist ends where the rot had started, set the tray on a proper solid bed, tanked the enclosure with a membrane the owners were invited to inspect before a single tile went on, and retiled. Two weeks, most of it spent undoing.

The finished bathroom looks almost identical to the one that failed, which is the honest, slightly painful truth of rescue work. The difference is all underneath, where it should have been the first time.