I'm glad to say the shower issue is fixed. The cause was both a poorly installed and caulked shower seat and a potentially faulty body jet spray. Everything is now reinstalled, retiled, and ready for use! Wahoo!
We were lucky that The Tile Shop still carried our tile so we didn't have to take more extreme measures. For those who are looking for the tile (one of the most frequently asked questions on this blog), the wall tile is Lansdale Carrara Medley (item #659075) and the mosaic floor tile is Lansdale Carrara Niles (item #655758). Of course the first salesperson I spoke to told me that neither was available and that I would be better off calling the main office to see if they could track it for me. PANIC!!! Grrrrr.... I felt like this guy might not be that with it so I talked to another salesperson and he located 2 boxes of the floor tile in the same store's storeroom (grrr... but thank goodness) and located 3 boxes of wall tile in another store 30 minutes away. Lesson learned: Don't take no for answer and if you don't trust the first person you talk to, find someone else! If you are looking for this tile, it does seem like it's not readily available right now so go get it ASAP if you want it.
The pictures aren't exciting so it just looks like our regular shower! Just waiting on the drywall and painting to be finished and we'll be fully back to normal!
The main lesson learned here is that you need to caulk your shower every year... We learned the hard way that this can make a small probably huge. It won't take long but it needs to be done!! One tip from the plumber was that if you want to use the caulk that matches your grout color around your plumbing fixtures, you can do a very thin "pencil" line of caulk so it really just looks like grout. Let that cure for a day, and then go in and cover that with a fat bead of clear silicone caulk which will hold up much longer and you won't be able to see it. At this point, I am really just aiming for function not beauty, but I thought I would pass that along.
We are so thankful that we chose a builder that is willing to stand by his work at any cost. He continues to answer our calls so we love him for that!