Oh oh... Shower is falling apart!

Over Thanksgiving I pulled off all the gloppy and gross silicone the former owners lined the guest bath with and replaced it neatly with beautifully applied latex caulk (if I say so myself). I knew the master bath was in a little worse shape, but planned the same thing for this long weekend, including properly replacing a row of tiles (It looked like he just stuck them on with the same silicone.

Well, I pulled the tiles off and it's all brown and gross, and an earwig was in there, and looks like he attached the tile (he tiled the whole shower himself) to sheet rock with the silicone instead of backing board. Part of it is soggy and part is cracked and broken. See picture.

I have no money right now, but plan to replace the whole shower in the future. What is easy that I can do now to keep it from getting worse, but without have to tear it out? I bought combo adhesive and grout just think I'd line the tiles up better and make it neat. Can I get away with laying in some compound to rebuild the backing and then reset the tile? I promise to make sure I have a good seal if you say yes. Really, it can't end up worse than it started. If I have to use something else, what should I get?

Help!

You probably don't have much left to adhere the tile to. For a temporary fix get a piece of plastic and cut it big enough to cover to the second course of tile, up from the tub and duct tape the top and sides of the plastic to the good area of tile, leave the bottom open for drainage and evaporation of any moisture in the wall. This will get you by till you can fix it properly.

yeah, the problem is you have moisture behind the tiles and some mold. The proper fix is to tear it out, put up backer and re-tile.

The plastic and duct tape will be an okay temporary method to keep water out before you re-tile.

If you want to just re-glue your tiles and caulk that may be okay as well, just dont expect it to hold up long. Make sure you have no cracks in the grout. Also, dont let it go too long without doing a proper repair. If you really have a lot of water seeping into the wall then you could end up with a lot of rot and a bigger repair down the road.

I suspect there is already a huge mess behind the wall looking at the quality of some of his other repairs in there that I'm trying not to look at. I'm a couple of years away from being able to really do anything about it. But what I thought was just a sloppy tile replacement turned out to be this, so the stuff that actually looks bad I don't think I really want to know about yet. I just want to even out or stabilize that bit of wall and put the tiles back the best way possible for now. I sprayed it with Tilex and it dried out overnight. Looks a *tiny* bit better.