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Shower base repair or shower base replacement? Try relining!

Shower base repair or shower base replacement? Try relining!
December 17, 2018 Inner Bath

Jane Doe is a busy lady. She has three school-aged children, a part-time job working at her local haberdashery shop and a tendency to run a very tight household. Jane likes her home to be neat and tidy. But she currently has one very big problem. A cracked shower base.


She didn’t think much of it at first as the hairline crack seemed innocuous to say the least. She had much bigger fish to fry, like convincing her youngest that fish won’t come swimming out of the tap. But the crack slyly grew and grew while she was preoccupied seeing to the many demands of everyday life.

One day, Jane noticed something strange. There was a constant damp, thick smell lingering about the bathroom. She washed all the towels and scrubbed the floors with bleach. It was still there. She got down on her hands and knees and inspected the cracked shower base. To her horror, she realised that the shower water was leaking through the crack to the flooring underneath – what a nightmare!

Jane said a few very bad words (luckily, the children were not home) and stomped her foot. She looked towards the heavens and sighed deeply. The problem shot directly to the top of her to-do list. She marched determinedly to her laptop and Googled ‘fix a cracked shower base.’ Half an hour (and several chocolate biscuits) later, she realised that she had three options for repairing this bathroom catastrophe.

A)Jane replaces her entire shower unit.

Out with the old and in with the new! Jane excitedly pulled up tabs on her browser for all the local bathroom showrooms to indulge in a brand new shower! But her elation plummeted as she read the four to five figure price tags next to the glossy photos of perfectly designed shower units. And that’s not even including installation costs. With this in mind, she called her local plumber thinking to ask her advice. The plumber was completely booked out for the next month! She told Jane that all the plumbers in the area were experiencing an extremely busy period, and she would be hard-pressed to find one able to take on a job within the next week. “Well this won’t do!” thought Jane, expelling all notions of shower base replacement from her mind. She moved onto the next option.

B) Jane resurfaces her shower base.

After a bit more internet surfing, and two cups of coffee, Jane realised that there were several ways to carry out shower resurfacing. She opted to try shower base re-enamelling and called a local service provider to discuss the process. Surely, she thought to herself, sanding back, filling in and painting over the crack would be much less of a hassle than replacing the entire shower! She was wrong. Jane rubbed her hand across her eyes as the shower base re-enamelling technician explained that the shower would be out of action for three days after the completion of the resurfacing process. She imagined having to wrestle the kids into the car every evening to take them to her mother’s for a wash. The technician asked her if there were any asthmatics in the family and she replied yes, trying to remember if she had packed Timmy’s puffer into his backpack that morning. There was a pause on the other end of the phone, and the technician enquired as to how severe the condition was, informing her that chemicals would need to be sprayed in the bathroom and could linger for some time. Jane put down the phone with a heavy heart and directed her attention to the last option.

C) Jane hires a professional to carry out shower base relining services.

Jane had never heard about shower relining before and was a little hesitant at first. But she watched a video explaining the process and thought that it was a clever idea indeed! A new acrylic, non-slip liner, moulded to fit the dimensions of the existing shower base, would be placed over the top of the cracked surface. The space between the old base and insert would be filled with expanding foam to provide a solid foundation for the new liner. Better yet, she realised, the services of a plumber were not needed, the whole process only took three hours, and the shower would be ready for use the very next day! Jane felt as though she had hit the jackpot – what a relief! She read a few testimonials from happy customers who had already had their shower base relined, and felt confident that she was choosing the right method of shower repair. Jane called Inner Bath in Brisbane and spoke to a friendly technician who quoted her a price that she thought she must have misheard.
“How affordable!” Jane commented, and the technician laughed, saying that the process was good for her wallet and good for the environment too.
“No point in completely replacing something that just needs a little TLC, is there?” the technician said.
They arranged a time for the technician to conduct the shower relining process, and Jane hung up the phone feeling much less stressed. Soon she would have a shower that looked good as new!

She grabbed her keys off the table and made her way to the garage, ready to head out for school pick-up. Perhaps it was time little Timmy made the progression from the bath to the shower, she thought distractedly. After all, it was easier to explain that fish couldn’t fit through the holes of a showerhead.

Is your shower base cracked, faded, peeling or badly corroded? The quickest and most affordable method of shower repair is shower base relining. Contact Inner Bath today to repair your shower base at a fraction of the price of replacing or resurfacing it!