Houck Remodeling

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Welcome to Houck Remodeling
Houck Remodeling is a family-owned and operated business. Our showroom is located at 39 W. Franklin, in Centerville, OH. We proudly serve the entire Dayton and surrounding areas. We strive to provide our customers with a finished product and a remodeling experience that exceeds their expectations, in the shortest time possible, and with the least inconvenience to your home life.

After the monster tear out everything went quite smoothly. We again used a KBRS base (http://www.showerbase2.com/). I just really cant say enough good things about these bases. TOTALLY impervious to water. It wont leak. They install easily (each is custom made to fit). We used concrete board for the vast majority of the shower walls. We did use a moisture resistant/ mold resistant drywall at the top of the shower walls. Every seam and crack was sealed with a bonding material that is water proof. Tile was installed, shower door, and trim kits for the faucet. Now the customer has a totally new, water tight, mold and mildew free bathroom.

During the tear out this is what we found just in the shower base threshold. This wood was more than likely installed when the second layer of tile was added. It was destined to fail, as it would be near impossible to adequately tie it into the original base with out weakening the structure. But that’s exactly what they did. The wood we pulled out was really wet, the customer was very fortunate that they didn’t have a much larger issue with mold (although we did find some and removed it.

You know the felling you get when you eat something you thought was something else? Like a chocolate chip you thought was going to be milk chocolate and it was really “bitter” chocolate…that brief moment where you pause and go “What the…?”
Well this shower job was that. From the first examination everything looked normal. It was dated, had been leaking and taking water (again the main failure was the “mud pan” tiled shower base). Simple. The job was to tear out the shower and old tile floor and install new. To tear the shower out you start by cutting around the perimeter and then knock a hole in the wall and start tearing the tile walls down. Shower door removed, check. Perimeter cut, check. Knock hole in wall, nope not gonna happen. Now normally i can knock a hole in the wall with one swing of the hammer (unless i hit the stud). I hit this one several times (in different spots) to no avail. At first i thought it was funny (since i was obviously finding all the stud behind the tile), then a whole chunk of tile fell off the wall to expose…more tile? Not so funny now. But wait it gets better. Not only was there another layer of tile and one might ask “why would you tile over the existing tile?” Good question. The reason is because who ever installed the original tile set it in one and a half inches of concrete, with wire mesh, and (for some reason) packed about another inch on the back side between the studs. Needless to say the tear out that was going to take 2-3 hours became an 8 hour tear out using a 40 lb hammer drill.
Below are the “before” photos.