Had a shower remodel about 6 months ago - tile walls, tile floor. Cracks in grout where walls meet the floor were repaired once by the tile installer by coating the cracks with non-sanded grout. Cracks reappeared which should be asthetic only (due to settling and all which I understand) and not cause leaks due to the liner that should be under the floor and up a bit on the walls - or so I am told. Unfortunately, I now have a huge leak in the ceiling of the room under the shower and it appears that the water is coming from where the shower walls meet the floor (the ceiling below is now ripped out)- essentially coming right through the cracks which run along 2 whole sides of the shower floor. Is the liner standard practice? If not, is the grout the only thing preventing failure of the shower? Can anyone help me understand what went wrong? Thanks!

Grout does nothing to waterproof your shower. In a conventionally built shower, the combination of a liner and some type of waterproofing on the walls keeps water running toward the drain.

It's hard to say exactly what is causing the problem until the shower is torn out to some degree. You can be sure that you'll have to take out the floor and wall tile up to about 6" above the level of the step. Since a patch job never looks as good as the original job, it's not a procedure that I recommend, but it can be done.

Most of the time, a failure in a tile shower is caused by an improperly installed liner. There are a number of things that could be done incorrectly, and any one of them could be the cause of failure.

Thanks for the information - I was guessing it can't be fixed or properly diagnosed without ripping out parts of the thing and you've confirmed that...

Not looking forward to that however.

Go to the home page of this forum and look at "how to build a shower pan" If yours was done correctly, then there should be liner running up the walls behind the backer board about 10 inches.

Like K-man said, there is a number of ways to screw it up. It really is amazing how many hacks stay in business.

Before you go ripping shower apart, you may want to look at the drain or the plumbing. If the water is leaking from the drain, you may be able to fix it without destroying the bottom half of the shower. If the plumbing in the wall is leaking, then it's another story. While you have the ceiling apart below, run the water for a while and try to see where the water is coming from.

If the problem is the pan itself, it can be fixed without too much demolition. It's just too bad because the shower is brand new.