I'm so glad I found this thread because I have a similar problem. We just bought our house a month ago. There's a window in the shower, above the tub. The previous owners had sealed the window shut with silicon caulk. I knew the grout would need touching up but this morning I tried opening the window to see how secure it was, and it opened right up. It wasn't even locked let alone sealed. There also is no extractor fan in there (having one installed this month) so now I'm really anxious that the wall is full of water. We can't afford a reno right now. Can anyone recommend the best stop gap solution to limit damage while we save up for a reno?

It's a little late now, but if you'd centered the middle of a tile instead of a grout joint, you would've eliminated that skinny little piece on either side, and still stayed centered. That aside, it looks good so far! Ivette-- I'm getting an education right now with respect to balloon construction! The one thing that almost stopped us from buying the house was that back side of the house bows (I would guesstimate) about 6-8" from the middle to the two corners. When I first saw it, I thought the house was getting ready to collapse until someone explained that with balloon construction, that's SUPPOSED to happen! Boy didn't I feel stupid!! I'm learning, though!

ugh, Bill, I am so confused. and i am soooo sorry to be so blonde. And you are so great to help... but I am seriously confused. You say "i did" as in I thought I understood you.... but my window, as currently installed.. doesn't give me the option of angling in to the window.. I think that you are saying to use the Keriband ( and ps by the way I am not sure what that is.._ between the tile and the wood.. and then to paint the hell out of it with marine paint. can you also tell me more about installing the kerdi to make it adhere to the wood? many thanks took strips of Kerdiband, and bridged from the cement board to the wood frame, so that there'd be no cracking between the two substrates. Any time you have something like this, where the rate of expansion and contraction will be different between two different substrates, you need to compensate for it some how. (in this case, there WAS a return to the window, but it was painted with a waterproof boat paint, so it's still the same scenario as yours) This will also help protect against water intrusion. Use a highly modified thinset to install the Kerdi, to make sure it bonds well to the wood frame.

Shower pan was hot mopped. Cement (or something that looked like cement to me) was put on bottom of wall and the bottom of the denshield had silicone or something like that put on it before the cement was put on. All the screws had silicone put over them and the seams were siliconed and taped.