Just When I Thought it Was Safe to Leave the Bathroom

I was sitting downstairs congratulating myself on finishing work on the upstairs bathroom when I suddenly heard a drip, drip, drip.  Water was dripping from the unfinished living room ceiling onto the floor!

My son was taking a bath upstairs and my wife was in there washing his hair.  My first thought was that the plumbing was leaking and that I would have to destroy the entire house and all my work of the last three years to fix it. (I tend to overreact in these situations.)  It turns out that my wife had splashed more than a little water on the floor and didn't get it all mopped up quickly.  Well this was a problem. It's likely that more than a little water will get spilled on the bathroom floor in the future, and I haven't designed the living room to include any water features, so something needed to be done.

The bathroom floor is far from level.  It has a pretty good slant towards one corner.  Remember, this is an old timber frame house.  Things have shifted and settled over the past 150 years.  When I tiled the bathroom I made a decision not to level the floor because it would have required building a new sub-floor (a cost in time and material) and it would have made for a change in elevation between the hallway and the bathroom just enough to trip you up in the night.  And frankly the charm of an old house comes from its many little idiosyncrasies like its uneven floors.

So how to keep the water from leaking?  Well, the problem lay in where the baseboard meets the tile.  With an uneven floor there are gaps along that edge.  I would have to put a bead of caulk there to keep errant splashes from rolling out of the room and beyond the edges of the tile job.  Don't ask me why I didn't do this in the first place.  I had all intention to but simply forgot after having started up on some other job.

Caulking can be a messy business.  I decided that a clear bead of caulk would look neater at a joint between natural wood and tile than white caulk, and besides, I had some clear caulk on hand.  I masked both sides of the joint, donned some latex gloves, and layed down a bead.

It turned out that the masking didn't work out as I intended.  Either I put the tape too close to the joint or I pulled up the tape at the wrong time. When I did pull up the tape, it pulled the bead of caulk right along with it.  For the second go-round, I didn't use any masking tape and worked carefully to keep the bead of caulk neat and contained.  After laying down a bead for the second time, I ran my finger along the joint to smooth it out.

I haven't gone and dumped a bunch of water on the floor to test it out yet, and after the caulk cures I will do a little test.  Certainly before I start the finish work on the living room ceiling, I've gotta be sure that small spills aren't going to become big problems.

Comments

[Jennifer]

We used the clear caulk around our tub... I think it looks better, too!