On Jun 27, 11:21*pm, Smitty Two wrote:
In article
,
*Higgs Boson wrote:



Thanks, Bob. *I'm reassured that you're going to be by my side,
pointing a very strong flashlight and holding a stun gun for the Black
Widows. *Plus a boombox emitting soothing meditation music for
claustrophobia. So equipped, I am (almost) ready to tackle the new
challenge, after shower has been on leave for a few weeks.

FWIW, I bought a house several years ago that had had a long-term leak
in the bathroom, and the previous owner had not repaired the damage
properly. I hired a guy to take the fixtures out and rebuild the floor.
But neither one of us really wanted to go slithering around in the crawl
space, to evaluate the extent of the damage. Finally I said, look, the
repair has to happen from up here, so let's just tear into it until we
have a big enough hole to see what's rotten, and enough working room to
fix it.

OMG I hope it won't come to that. I, too, was wondering why I need to
go into the (yeccch!) crawl space, when there doesn't seem to be any
effect on the vinyl tile at the bottom of the narrow wall between
stall shower and tub shower

Update: I have been monitoring the area since, on advice of NG, we
stopped using the stall shower. It has dried out enough to suggest
strongly that the leak is coming from the stall shower. Now I have
to bring in the plumber to advise where the leak might be. I have
notes of all suggestions from this NG. Frustratingly, nothing seems
to be visibly wrong. My initial suspicion is that the leak is inside
the wall. (Reminder: the pipe holding the shower head just comes
right out of the wall; no way to get access, AFAIK, w/o removing
individual tiles and opening up wall.)

Interesting side-note: When the bathroom was redone, over 30 years
ago !!!! the great old lathe & plaster was replaced by greenboard.
But the problem area still has lathe & plaster -- as revealed when I
chopped away all the brownish wet gunk, back to the wood. Wonder why
they left that?