Failed tile floor with cracked joists repair

A Keizer, Oregon homeowner called Matteson Contracting about what they’d started calling “the bathroom from hell.” The bathroom had been remodeled by another contractor just a few years earlier, but the tile started cracking and coming loose almost immediately. The old tile lifted off the floor in about ten minutes flat, a job that normally takes hours, which was the first sign of how badly it had been installed. Whoever set the original tile used a trowel with too small a notch size, leaving nowhere near enough thin-set coverage on the backs of the tiles. Without full mortar coverage, the tiles were never properly bonded to the floor, so it was only a matter of time before the grout cracked and the tile came loose.

Once the tile was out, a bigger problem showed up. The floor dropped 5/8 of an inch over just three feet in front of the toilet, which is not normal settling. Digging into the subfloor turned up a cracked floor joist, and right next to the toilet, someone had drilled roughly ten holes through it over the years, several of them overlapping into one large hole straight through the middle of the joist. With plumbing running right on the other side, this wasn’t a simple patch job. Matteson Contracting sistered new 2x6 lumber to the damaged joist, securing it with a steel plate and 5/8” structural bolts, and reinforced the adjacent joist the same way, bringing the floor back to level and restoring real structural integrity so the failure couldn’t repeat itself.

From there, the repair became a full floor and tile rebuild: the damaged tongue-and-groove subfloor was replaced, a new plywood subfloor installed on top, and Schluter-DITRA crack isolation membrane installed to protect the new tile from any future subfloor movement. The customer’s chosen tile was installed in the staggered pattern they wanted, and trim and the toilet were reinstalled to finish the job. The bathroom from hell isn’t one anymore.

Why this matters for Keizer-area homeowners

Bad tile work often isn’t just cosmetic — it can be hiding a structural problem underneath. In this case, what looked like a simple grout-and-tile failure turned out to be a cracked, over-drilled floor joist that had been quietly failing for years. A proper diagnosis before retiling anything is what catches problems like this before they get tiled over a second time.

Serving Keizer and the surrounding area

Matteson Contracting is a veteran-owned, licensed general contractor (CCB #249540) based in Lebanon, Oregon, serving Keizer, Salem, Albany, Lebanon, and Eugene.

We handle bathroom remodels, tile installation, and structural repairs — including subfloor and joist repair — all built on our motto: do it right the first time.