Mike Dimitroff


Home > Projecs > Bathroom 2007

Home

Boat

Bathroom2007.aspx page

foo
Here's the old pedestal sink.
I figured "while I was at it" and had the other side of the bathroom wall open I might as well replace the crappy old pedestal sink. It was a ten year old Home Despot special in desperate need of replacement.
Let these spictures be a warning to anyone who wants to use sheetrock around their tub or shawer. Don't do it. Even the green stuff isn't good for this purpose, sheet rock just can't hadle to constant moisture.



In this picture I haven't removed the sheetrock to the right of the rotten area yet.
Here's more waterlogged sheetrock I'm getting ready to replace.
and more...


If you look closely you'll see light shinning thru the crackes between the tiles. At this point the tiles are only being held up by the grout.
What should I do now? I briefly contemplated gutting my bathroom, but then thought better of it. Did I really want to gut my kitchen AND bathroom simultaneously? If I did that I might never finish.

If I didn't want to gut my bathroom how could I fix the wall behind these tiles without disturbing them? I had a crazy idea for a solution. Epoxy. I leaned to use epoxy when I built my boat and have come to appreciate it's amazing engineering properties. When you start adding thickeners and fiberglass you can do amazing thins with epoxy.
In this pic I'm applying straight epoxy to the tile, sheetrock and studs in the area of the repair. If I didn't pre-wet these areas the porous material might have sucked up to much epoxy from my putty mixture.
and more straight epoxy.










This picture shows some of the fiberglass that was applied between layers of putty.




This shot gives you a sense of the size of the area I repaired with epoxy and fiberglass. I created a laminate by adding layers of epoxy putty and fiberglass. It's super strong, probably the strongest part of my bathroom wall.