Grout repair in Chandler

What actually needs repairing

Four things, and they show up in predictable places.

Cracked grout

Fine lines running along a joint, most often where the floor meets a wall or at a doorway. Usually movement, sometimes the original mix, and it lets water into the substrate.

Hollow grout

Looks fine and sounds wrong. Tap along a joint and a hollow note means the grout has separated from the tile edge even though the surface is intact. It fails properly not long after.

Crumbling grout

The joint gives up sand when you run a fingernail along it. Common on older floors and in wet areas, and there is nothing solid left for a sealer to attach to.

Missing grout

Self-explanatory, and usually in the busiest three feet of the house. The gap collects soil, water gets under the tile, and the tile edges start to chip.

Where we find it in Chandler homes

Consistent enough to list, and it says something about how floors wear here.

• Doorways and thresholds, which take concentrated traffic and a change in floor structure
• Walked routes through kitchens, particularly from the garage door
• Around toilets and under vanities, where water sits unnoticed
• Shower floors and the joint at the base of the walls, which is the wettest joint in the house
• Along the base of kitchen cabinets, where mopping water repeatedly collects
• Anywhere a previous repair was done badly, usually with the wrong material

Why it comes before sealing, always

Worth spelling out because it is the single most common way money gets wasted in this trade.

A sealer, clear or colored, bonds to the surface of the grout. If that surface is cracked, hollow or crumbling, there is nothing sound for it to bond to. The coating goes on, looks correct for a while, and then comes away with the material underneath it.

So on any job involving sealing, repair gets flagged during the walkthrough and quoted alongside everything else. You see one complete number and decide once, rather than getting a second number halfway through the work.

If you would rather not do the repair, that is a legitimate choice. It means we clean the floor and skip the sealing, because selling you a seal we expect to fail is not something we are willing to do.

Why it is quoted on sight

Everything else on this site has a published number. Repair does not, and the reason is honest rather than evasive.

Two feet of surface cracking and two feet of joint that has crumbled to the substrate look similar in a photo and involve completely different amounts of work. A number given over the phone would be a number that changes at the door, which is exactly the practice the rest of this site argues against.

So $150 is the floor, we look at what is actually broken, and you get a figure that holds.

When repair is not the answer

Sometimes the grout is a symptom, and repacking the joint treats the symptom.

If tile is cracking in a line across a floor, or if grout keeps failing in the same joint after being repaired, something underneath is moving. Slab movement, a failed underlayment, or a joint that needed to be flexible and was grouted solid instead.

Repacking that joint buys months. We will tell you when that is what we are looking at rather than take $150 to do it twice, and in that situation the useful call is a tile contractor rather than us.

Questions