Ignoring a small problem eventually leads to a terrible, huge problem

I'm fortunate enough to have a walk-in shower room in my house, something I think is quite unusual in Britain. It's just a small space, lined on all sides by traditional ceramic tiles, with a shower head in the middle. It was one of the things that sold the house to me, to be honest: the sight of those shiny, glazed tiles and that gleaming chrome pipework -- marvellous. I just loved it. I used it night and day.

After about ten years, I started to notice problems. Some of the tiles were getting loose, and there was a bit of mould in the corners. But I was a working man in those days, with a living to earn and a family to raise. I did the minimum I could to fix the problems in the shower room, and just tried to ignore the long-term consequences. I knew that I'd pay the price for this negligence eventually, but I didn't have time to worry about it -- or so I told myself.

Well, retirement came to me eventually, and I finally had time to think about re-tiling the shower room. By this time it was getting a bit skanky, to be honest. I did ask some local builders to quote for doing the work, but the prices were eye-popping -- and those were for replacing those marvellous ceramic tiles with plastic panels that just looked like tiles. Ugh. Nobody was even willing to quote for doing the job properly.

So I resigned myself to a bit of DIY. I knew I'd have to strip all the old tiles first, and I expected that to be a hard, dusty, dangerous job -- the kind where you need heavy gloves, goggles, and a respirator. I invested in a hardened steel chisel bit for my pneumatic drill (yes, I'm that kind of DIY-er), thinking that a bit of motorized support would ease the burden of the demolition.

In fact, the moment I touched the chisel to the surface, the entire wall shed its tiles, all at once. They just slid right off, all of them, as if they'd only been held on by wishful thinking these last ten years. All the other walls went the same way. I ended up with about three hundred tiles in a heap on the floor.

That wasn't the worst of it: when the tiles came down, they brought with them all the underlying plaster, and part of the brickwork. Those walls that were made of wooden studs had turned entirely to black, slimy paste.

It turned out that water had been running down behind the loose tiling for years, softening and dissolving the walls, and allowing mould to take root.

Even that wasn't the worst of it. The worst came when I put my foot right through the floor. The water that had been running down the walls had to go somewhere, after all, and where it went was into the wooden flooring. And, as it turned out, the joists under the flooring. Some of these were rotten, too -- one had been eaten away completely, leaving a brick wall with no support. Frankly, it's a wonder the wall hadn't collapsed.

What I'd expected to be a lengthy, but routine, tiling job turned into a major remediation effort. I had to get under the floor and treat all the rot in the joists, replace some of them, and put in additional supports. Then I had to take up the rest of the floor tiles, and replace the rotten flooring. Then I had to re-plaster the brick walls, and completely rebuild the wooden ones. Only then could I start the job I had originally planned, and re-tile the walls.

In the end, the job I'd expected to take a couple of days took a whole month -- a month of sweat, cursing, and frustration. Had I tackled the loose tiles properly when I first saw them ten years earlier, I'd probably have avoided all that pain, along with the substantial risk of my house falling down.

I suppose we all know, on some level, that small problems grow into big problems, if they're left to fester. Still, I was surprised -- even at my age -- to see just how rapidly that can happen, and how catastrophic the consequences can be.

So if you see a small problem -- whether in your house, your health, or you life -- tackle the damned thing straight away, even if it's inconvenient. Your future self will thank you for it.

Published 2026-02-25, updated 2026-02-25

Ignoring a small problem eventually leads to a terrible, huge problem

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