Built Around the Existing Structure
Thirty Years of Daily Use, and What It Does Underneath
Unlike most of the Cape, Bourne is lived in all year. The houses are family houses, the bathrooms get used every morning, and the shower that is being replaced has usually done twenty or thirty years of real service rather than sitting idle for ten months at a time.
That changes what we expect to find. Slow failures have had time to develop. A membrane that was marginal when it was built, a mortar bed that cracked early, a drain assembly that has been weeping gently into the subfloor since the nineties: none of that is visible until the tile comes off, and all of it is common in a house with this much use behind it.
The upside is that the framing is usually ordinary modern framing and straightforward to work with. The question is rarely whether the floor can carry tile, it is how much of the substrate under the old shower is still sound.
So a Bourne job is quoted with the removal treated as a real part of the scope, not an afterthought. Once it is open the substrate is repaired rather than covered, the shower is rebuilt on Schluter Kerdi-Board, waterproof through the panel, and a bonded membrane is detailed over every seam, corner and curb.
On a shower that has worked every day for thirty years, the honest number comes after the tile is off.