Leak Repair & Regrouting in Cloverdale

Cloverdale sits in the City of Belmont and was built out largely in the post-war decades, so a great deal of its housing is single-storey brick-and-tile on a generous block. Those bathrooms were built when a shower recess was tiled over a sand-and-cement bed and finished with cement-based grout. Sixty or seventy years on, grout of that age is doing very little waterproofing on its own: it goes chalky in the base corners first, where the water load is heaviest, and the silicone at the wall junctions perishes along with it.

Since the 2000s a large share of those blocks has been subdivided, adding villas, townhouses and small apartment groups among the original houses. Those bring the other failure we see here, the twenty-year one: tiling that is still perfectly sound over grout and silicone that have reached the end of their service life, often worst around a linear waste channel where water sits longest after the shower is turned off.