The wall is rotting. Am I good?

July 30, 2021 7:03 AM

One of my bathrooms is shoddily constructed, and leakage from the shower is causing the corner of a wall to start rotting (there is no way to completely prevent this leakage while still making use of the shower). How urgent of a problem is this?

The ultimate plan is to take out a home equity loan so we can gut and remodel the whole bathroom, but for reasons (including the current price of building materials), we would like to wait a year or so to do that. Am I exposing myself to anything terrible (black mold, irreversible house damage) if I ignore the wall rot in the meantime?

posted by missrachael to Home & Garden (17 answers total)

Think of an apple with a brown spot. You cut out the brown spot now, while it's small. You still have most of a good apple.

Think of an apple with a brown spot. You let the apple sit on the counter for a week. You might still have most of a good apple, or you might have half a good apple, and half a rotten apple.

Rot is rot.
posted by aniola at 7:05 AM on July 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

"The corner of a wall" sounds like drywall, which can be replaced (and would be in a gut job anyway.) Rotting beams are a different issue.

And I hate to be the asshole who questions the premise of the question, but acrylic patch, Gorilla sealant, Flexifiller and plumbing patch tape all exist. Are you sure you can't address this issue with a temporary fix?
posted by DarlingBri at 7:22 AM on July 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

It really depends on a lot of factors how urgent it is. What's the cost of getting it remediated until you can do the gut remodel vs. potential damage long term?

Strangers on the Internet are going to have a hard time helping you assess this. Especially since there are many variables not given here: Where's the bathroom? Is it upstairs or downstairs? Is the water leaking into a ceiling? How much rot are we talking? Do you already have mold?

What's the cost of a, potentially not pretty but functional, fix right now? What additional damage might you have to address that goes beyond the gut remodel in a year?

My suggestion: have a contractor take a look and assess the damage and tell you what it'll cost to do an interim fix. You have no way of knowing how long the price of building materials will remain high, or if it's going to come down at all.
posted by jzb at 7:25 AM on July 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm a total layperson but I have lived in a house where the bathtub came through the ceiling, so I would consider this urgent.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:25 AM on July 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

Yeah you don't fuck around with water damage. Either get a pro out to assess what can be done to stop the damage from spreading, or stop using the shower. Mold is absolutely a possibility, as well as ever-increasing structural damage.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:32 AM on July 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

For a temporary fix, I would put plastic sheeting over the wet area and fasten with caulking. If you can get the area to dry out it should stop the progress of the rot, and not get any worse. Hopefully you have caught it before there is structural damage.
posted by H21 at 7:41 AM on July 30, 2021

(including the current price of building materials)

2X4s were more expensive, but the price has already come down. I just checked an 8ft 2X4 is $5.50. Most building materials are about the same price as they were before covid. Some specialized materials may be unavailable, but they aren't particularly more expensive.

Like others have said, water is a serious problem and if your walls are rotting you need to get it fixed as soon as you can.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:48 AM on July 30, 2021

One thing about rot on a bathroom wall is that it means the wall was made out of the wrong stuff. Popping out the sheet of drywall (if that's what it is), replacing with cement board, skimming the joints, caulking fixtures, and repainting should cost like $50 in materials. And more importantly, if you do this, you will see what's going on behind the wall which is the real question.
posted by goingonit at 8:05 AM on July 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

You'll spend more $$ fixing the damage the water will cause in one year than you'll save in lumber prices.
posted by kaefer at 8:15 AM on July 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

Also, if this is an upstairs bathroom (and/or if you have a basement), you should assume that the rot and potentially mold is inside the wall on all lower floors.
posted by grateful at 8:21 AM on July 30, 2021

How urgent of a problem is this?

Extremely.
The rotting won't stop, weakening everything it spreads to. It will also bring along its good buddy, mold, which will then make the situation a health problem.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:07 AM on July 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd agree with DarlingBri and goingonit that one of the more likely scenarios is that the walls were slapped together with plain ol' drywall or even greenboard that's now turning into chalky goop and then crumbling. I encountered this when I redid my bathroom to deal with an accumulation of bad decisions and bodges and replaced it with cement board, sealed up the gaps and then tiled over it. It wasn't very expensive. (The blades and drill bits to cut the cement board and the screws to mount it were more expensive than the board itself. The tiles were just plain off-white squares.) The wood behind the boards was structurally sound, which was a relief.

But it's not something you can put off while continuing to use the shower, and you absolutely need to open up the walls to see exactly what's going on.
posted by holgate at 11:28 AM on July 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

You've at very very least got to stop using the shower and let things dry. Otherwise the inside damage is just going to keep getting worse. It's possible that right now the structural parts of the wall are wet but salvageable: that will 100% not be the case if you keep adding water daily for another year. The visibly rotted section should be cut away to facilitate inspection and airflow, and then you'll have a much better basis for making decisions about how urgent this is.
posted by teremala at 12:31 PM on July 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

This happened to us with our new home a few months ago. We immediately stopped using the bathroom, called in a remediation company who opened two walls in the bathroom and the room under it, found a moderate amount of mold behind the wall, and cleaned it out and painted with a mold resistant paint. Then, we had a plumber come in who found a leaking section of metal pipe from the bathroom above and replaced it with new PVC, and then had a contractor rebuild everything. It took about two weeks and was expensive.

One useful tip - call your homeowners insurer early on. There is a good chance that some or all of this will be covered. And even if not, they will know who in the area can be trusted with this kind of work.
posted by redondo77 at 6:53 PM on July 30, 2021

One useful tip - call your homeowners insurer early on.

Careful with that. I called my insurer once as soon as I learned about a burst pipe, and they opened a claim. The total for repairs turned out to be under the deductible, so I paid for it all out of pocket, but this claim was my second in five years. That made it extremely difficult to get insurance when I moved to a new house, because insurers share that information and I was blacklisted. My take-away was: Never call insurance until you know it's well above the deductible.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:14 PM on July 30, 2021

We had this problem in a rental house. By the time our landlord got around to getting it repaired, the workers told us that the tub was in danger of falling into the basement.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:36 AM on July 31, 2021

Yes, it's really important. Can you put up more shower curtains or do any other makeshift thing to manage water?
posted by theora55 at 7:41 AM on August 3, 2021