Progress on our disaster, and thankfully not as bad as it looked!

Our travail began with a broken tile in front of the refrigerator.  We have over the years had a couple breaks, they are inevitable in a flexing, bumping house going down the road and we had pretty much ignored it as we had an appointment to have hardwood floors installed in December.  Well, it seemed to be getting worse somehow, more breakage, and were we feeling a soft spot in the floor at the broken tile?!?  How could that be?  After all it is almost in the center of the coach?  Now that we are parked here in Florida for 4 months we decided we needed to figure it out.

So we dug up the broken tile in front of the frig and OMG, it was black and rotted underneath!

The first tile of many

We got the frig all the way out of our work area and started tearing up tiles to see how extensive the water damage was.

More removal

Still more

Area seems to be getting bigger!
You can see the water damage in the foreground

We ended up taking up about 65 square feet of tile and 1/2" underlayment.  You can see the black membrane in the pictures, that is the plastic layer that Monaco installed between the 3/4" sub or structural floor and the underlayment and the one thing that saved our butts.  It kept all the water above the 3/4" floor and under the tiles.  There were a few areas where the 3/4" was a bit damp, but that was all.  

A good shot of the plastic membrane

By now we had somewhat recovered from that absolute feeling of dread and tried to see the good side of all this.  One we found a leak that left unchecked had the potential of destroying our motorhome, it gave us an opportunity to do some demolition of tile and save some money in the upcoming floor redo, plug and seal the offending leak, and reevaluate and determine what our new floor will look like.

The culprit in this entire ordeal is a panel on the side of the motorhome that normally is installed to provide access to an RV type refrigerator, ours has a residential frig just like in a house, so we were surprised that Monaco still installed the panel, but never gave it a thought as every motorhome that we have owned has had one of these panels.  The rub is they replaced the normal plastic sealing panel with a panel fabricated out of aluminum.  It turns out that with every rain and every wash or any moisture on the side of the motorhome water poured into the coach, and it evidently went down a seam in the floor and was trapped under the tile, and since tile and grout are somewhat porous some of it would evaporate so we were never ever aware this was happening.  When we pointed a hose on the panel, it leaked so bad we might as well have just put the hose inside the coach!

The offending panel

A shot with the panel removed
You can also see the crack the water
traveled down to the foreground

I can tell you now that panel will never leak again!  I will be the first to admit we are not used to this kind of work, and also tile does not come up easily, it fights you all the way.  Even after doing several and getting the hang of it we still averaged 15-20 minutes EACH!  And just to make it interesting it shatters into small razor sharp pieces.  No fun especially with all the work on our knees getting up and down constantly.  But we kept telling ourselves it could be so much worse and that we had to get the tile up anyway for our floor redo.

My butt being kicked!

Remaining positive.

So now we have about 100 square feet of tile removed and all the bad underlayment.  We are replacing the underlayment with plywood.  Oh I should add we also took this opportunity to reinforce the main floor by installing 5 extra "joists" under the floor.  That was accomplished by removing access panels in the basements and Jan crawling in to prep and glue them in place while I drove screws in from above.  Our floor is flat and stronger than it ever was now.

Looking forward
All the tiles on the right have since been removed 

We have had several ideas come up as we have toiled away.  Originally we were just going to tear out all the tile ( the entire motorhome with the exception of most of the bedroom and one slide is tile) and replace with hardwood, then we thought, well heck since we had done all this anyway maybe we wanted to reinstall different tile in the galley, hallway, and toilet compartment, then we finally decided on our final plan to install some new tile in front of the galley and in the toilet compartment with the rest being all hardwood.  So meanwhile we are also tile shopping.

Contemplating the options in our very
cluttered workspace

So all in all we have been very busy and very sore doing all this work.  Karen has been very helpful by making us delicious dinners each evening which we crawl over to moaning with our aches and pains.  So now we are almost done, and have tile ordered and either we will install it or possibly we will have it installed, we don't know yet.  I'll keep you up to date, oh yeah, we are also just enjoying Florida and the warmth!