clg, I'm sorry--I meant a random orbit sander. We have one that is one of my best remodeling friends :) I used some 60 paper on it to sand down thinset bit by bit to get to the wires. You'll want to have a shopvac handy, the windows open, and to wash your hair after you're done, unless you like the statuary coiffure look :) (kind of fun to play with before you shower, though :)) weedyacres, I had *planned* to remove the grout with a dremel, but there were some coping saw blades lying around and I picked one up to do something else and found myself using them on the grout, just fine. The tiles are 8.5x17, so I had 17" groutlines to slice away into. Then I cut canals in the tile with a 4.5" angle grinder, another one of my remodeling best friends (although I have a love/hate relationship with it at this point). Not all the way through, just most of the way down. When I whacked the tile with the hammer, the tile (very hard throughbody porcelain) just cracked up, not necessarily along the canals specifically, but much more than it had pre-canal. YOu really want to make sure you do the groutlines before you whack, though, so the impact doesn't transfer over to any neighboring tiles you want to keep in.

1- You can't grout over old cement based grout. Do you know the specific grout used? Was it a dry powder you mix with water ? If yes, you cannot grout over grout. You'll have to dig out at least half the depth of the old grout to grout in that area. If you used one of the newer single component grouts such as Fusion, Plasma or Flexcolor, you can grout over grout but they are the only exceptions to the rule. 2- Never heard of such a thing. Do you have any spare sheets lying around? Take one to an artist with a sharp eye for color and ask if you doubt yourself.

I've tiled my own two bathrooms and my kitchen backsplash, so when my adult daughter's shower sprung a leak at her "new" (circa 1950) home, DH & I came to the rescue. Ripped out the whole tub surround (it gave up without a fight), fixed the plumbing, reinsulated, added backerboard, taped, mudded and commenced to tiling. Got complicated around the tub; being an old steel tub, it has about a 1" flange around the top edges as though it's supposed to bolt to something? We ran the backerboard down to within 1/4th" of that flange, did the tape /mud/dry time thing and then commenced to tiling. When I got to the grout, I must say, the grout was a tad drier than I'd liked for it to be, but I worked quickly and thought I'd done okay. We spaced the bottom row of tile to cover that backerboard/flange gap, which it did okay. Then I left my daughters to finish grouting the normal 1/4th gap around the edge of the tub. I would have used caulk, but since the gap varied some, the girls used the regular grout to finish off that bottom edge and the corners. Are you with me so far? It looked really nice. Now I notice a lot of little tiny cracks in the grout all over and I'm thinking I'll be okay to just smash in another coat of it. (She hasn't used any tile sealer, yet.) EXCEPT.........she called tonite to say the whole bottom row of that grout is soaking wet, coming out in big soggy clumps and some of the tile with it. My thoughts are that she didn't let the tile cure enough before going in and using it, so now we need to pull out all the soggy stuff and redo it from there. So, the questions are: did we handle the backerboard/tile/grout around that flange right? Or is there just enough movement in a steel tub to disallow a grout (vs caulk) to flex. If that makes any sense.......And the second question is: am I on the right track to fix it? How long does it REALLY take for tile to cure enough to take a shower? Please tell me I don't have to take down this whole job.....this is a single mother with a TEENAGE daughter who will just DIE if she doesn't get to shower. Thanks for reading this far............. mm

First we have to figure out which door. I think I don't like Pal's for this exercise because they have a less pronounced grain than most of the golden oak I've seen. I'm thinking along the lines of LWO's 2, 5, 7, 8, 10 or 11, or the one I posted. The grain is too fine on Pal's, the color isn't yellow/orange enough on LWO's 1, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 13. Twelve is so ratty it's impossible to believe anyone would keep them (maybe they could be painted). Speaking of which, is the rule going to be no painting? I think it should be. What about staining? I've been thinking of the exercise as how to work with the color as-is. What's the consensus?