Re: Home Depot crew
To defend the Tiger here, the code is strangely silent in a lot of areas, many times deferring to manufacturers' instructions, to take but two examples AAMA window installation recommendations, and TCA tile installation instructions. These both are installation instructions written up by trade associations, instructions written solely to protect the manufacturers.
To take one, look at what the code says about waterproofing showers, very little if any, deferring to the TCA manual. The TCA manual had approved installation instructions for greenboard with tile glued directly on the board creating a surface barrier installation that never works, and is now withdrawn. There are now installation instructions for cement board, again surface barrier installations that don't work, and never will, they fly in the face of building science which is seldom even considered in writing codes. The TCA manual now recommends sealant in the joints between pans and bathtubs with tile over them, all this does is keep grout from cracking loose, but in the process seals water into the wall causing leakage and dryrot in the walls, and dryrot causes structural damage, supposedly one of the main reasons for building codes, so inspectors go around measuring the nail spacing in shear walls while allowing showers that are going to rot the walls out in a few years, no matter how many nails are installed in the shear walls, or how far they are placed apart.
Back in the 50s, when times were simpler and the code book was about an inch thick, the City of Piedmont had many fine old mansions, leaking showers over beautifully built and furnished rooms was common. There was an old part-time inspector there named Mr. Sanders, Mr. Sanders had his own what we now know as a Tiger Code, he required all shower walls to be marine grade plywood, he required copper or lead pans, and also required the walls and pans to be hot-mopped, no matter how hard and dangerous it was for a roofer to hot mop vertical surfaces. Mr. Sanders taught me a lot, nobody dared cross him, I learned a lot from him, and I still build showers by Mr. Sanders' Tiger Code, and my showers don't leak 50 years later.