What to do when you are all cracked up

So my hubby walks up to me one day and tells me we have an ant infestation in the room the kids use as a playroom. He also tells me he sprayed the area down and the bathroom that my 2 beautiful boys have been using is a mess. So I'm thinking, eh it can't be that bad. OMGosh I was totally wrong. I need to remember the difference between women and men.

A woman would have come and and said it's nasty in there. Apparently men say it's a mess most likely in the hopes of having to avoid cleaning it themselves. Normally in our home who sees the mess cleans the mess. However, I have been uber lazy in the kitchen and not putting my dishes away etc. So I decided that I will clean the bathroom a week later. I just about died. Thank goodness no one but my kids use that bathroom. I put on gloves and my dust mask I use for sanding. More to protect myself from flying debris, well that and bleach.

I cleaned as much as I could until I finally had to get down on my knees and scrub. I already knew the grout was permanently stained but since I just regrouted my bathroom I wasn't too worried. Well I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed some more. I could not get some odd gray marks off the tile. On closer inspection I realized why. The tiles were cracked!

I just about hit the roof when I suddenly realized there is no way on earth that my kids could have cracked this tile. (well there is but they don't get to play with the tools). Upon closer examination I realized that the tile was installed - gasp- incorrectly. I know what a shocker for a track home.

For those of you who may not know (and it used to be me) a track home is one of the massed produced homes going up rapidly all across America. So each team of workers goes from one home to another slapping everything together. I'm not going to blast the workers as I feel they have to rush through the job as the owners of the business and supervisors want quantity not quality. Well I want quality.

What I got instead are people who grouted the different plans of tile. Now you might ask why this is important and I'm going to give you a brief run down and a link to an excellent site with more info than you probably want to know. When you are tiling your floor you leave a minimum gap between the floor tile and the wall. This allows your floor to contract and expand with the weather/temperature. When you put up baseboard (whether it's tile or wood) you also leave a gap for the same reason. Now this gap is filled with caulk. The most easily screwed up and hated substance you need in a bathroom. If you go and push on caulk what does it do? It gives as it's resilient and pliable. This is so it will move as does the floor and baseboard. Now if you do something like, um grout it, you are putting cement in between 2 plans (surfaces) that move. So when u push on concrete does it move? Um, no it doesn't. So you might ask yourself what happens, well my bathroom happens. You end up with tiles that crack under the pressure. Not just one tile but 8! Two were because they decided to not cut the door trim high enough which means they didn't leave the proper gap and u guessed it 2 cracked tiles.

So at this point I'm thinking I don't want to spend money but I do need practice for my master bath. Practice for what? Demo and retiling! That's what. Thankfully my husband is willing to let me redo the bathroom. I'm planning on keeping the toilet, vanity and tub. All I need to do is take out the toilet (ewww), demo the tile floor and demo the shower walls. Now a sane person would just do the floor tiles and be done with it, but I never said I was sane. Plus with our house being 9 years old there are no matching tiles available. I also didn't want to have a different style tile in my shower than on the floor. So my husband agreed it had to get replaced (I told u he is a smart cookie).

Next up: Now that you know I can do this (and by default so can you) here is what u need to know.