The tile guy's tape measure trick still bugs me 3 years later

Back in 2021 I had this old guy named Jerry come out to give me a quote on redoing a small shower stall in my place near Pittsburgh. He walked in, didn't even look at the water damage, just pulled out this beat up Stanley tape and started measuring the grout lines. He told me, "Honey, you don't measure the tile, you measure the gaps," and then he spent like 10 minutes explaining how all my crooked walls were throwing everything off by a quarter inch. I thought he was just being dramatic until he showed me how the floor sloped toward the drain, which I never noticed in 8 years of living there. He quoted me $4,200 and said most people miss the real problem, which is the subfloor, not the tile. I ended up going with a cheaper guy and guess what, the shower still leaks. Has anyone else had a contractor point out something obvious that you totally missed, and did you regret not listening to them?

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noahgreen12d ago

Hearing "measure the gaps" gave me chills because that old timer knew exactly what he was talking about, and that $4,200 probably saved people way more in the long run.