A Shoddy Patch job

Ellen C. Wells

I vow to never shop at one of those national discount DIY centers ever again. Mark my word, I’m not even driving through the parking lot (okay, maybe I will but only because Target is next door).

This Big Box’s television advertisements make shopping there and working on your own home improvement project look so easy. You can do this, is their underlying message.

A bold-faced lie!

What has gotten my cockles all in a tuffle? A home improvement project that, while it didn’t go horribly wrong, was a much bigger bite than I could chew.

The project of which I speak is fixing the grout in my shower. It’s an all-tile shower, and some of the grout between the tiles had chipped and cracked. So I went to said Big Box for some advice and product for a little patch work. A store assistant found me looking perplexed at the selection of grout—and I explain the situation to him: An all-tile shower with some grout missing in places. “What kind of grout?” he asks. I say it is a gray grout with a sandy texture. He leads me to the sandy-textured grout and shows me about six different hues of gray sandy grout in two different container sizes.

“Which gray?” he asks. I can’t be sure. Two colors are awfully close, and they are available only in the bigger container. I pick what I think is the closest match.

“But I want the colors to match,” I tell him, “or it’s going to look like a mismatched patch job.”

“Well, regrout the whole shower and it will all match!” he says with a big smile and with such ease. “It’s easy, I’ll show you what you need.” He then takes me over to the grout and tiling accessory section and pulls out a few items—this tool for stripping out the grout, this floater to spread the grout, this sponge to wipe it off. Three steps and—boom!—I’m done. Easy peasy.

It wasn’t easy, not at all. Surface stripping is what it is—a long and arduous process. Next: applying the grout. Any of you who have worked with sanded grout know I was in for a horrible experience. For those of you not familiar, it’s like working with an egg-and-dairy-free pie dough. The stuff just fell apart in chunks and fell like globs of wet snow onto the shower floor.

I completed one of the shower’s three walls and was done with it. In the end the wall I did complete looks good, although it doesn’t look much different than it did before. However, it was a bigger job than I could handle myself. And I’m livid—nay, angry!—at the associate who said it was such an easy job.

I know that the gospel according to garden centers is they help customers be successful with real and honest education about and assistance with gardening. This Big Box makes the same claims about a variety of home improvement projects. My point with all of this is sometimes your customer can’t do the weekend project that for you, for a professional, would be a piece of cake.

Give your customers confidence, yes, but also help them to be realistic. Otherwise, your customer’s failed project will be an albatross hung around your neck.

Regarding the other two shower walls, I did eventually take dollops of grout and patch the remaining pinholes and cracks. And what do you know, but the color doesn’t quite match after all. GP