Tiling A Shower Without Making A Terrible Mess
Tiling a shower pan yourself looks like an almost impossible task. That's partly because most of the working parts of a tile shower are hidden away deep within the floor. Without seeing what happens in the floor it may appear a shower floor is less complex than it really is. Here is why the shower floor is complex and how to make it less so.
See the problem is that tile floors leak including the one at the bottom of a shower. Unless the right steps happen, that leaky shower floor will cost somebody a lot of money, maybe more than you can imagine. What happens is the water that hits the floor seeps through both the grout lines and the tile itself to a lesser degree. That water just keeps slowly working it's way down and out.
A properly built shower floor catches that water with a built-in layer and funnels it down the drain. Within a masonry shower floor lies one layer that stands between the water and the rest of your house. Called a shower pan, what really stops the water is one sheet of a vinyl membrane that is built into the floor.
Really the waterproof layer gets sandwiched between a bottom layer of mortar and a tops layer of mortar. The bottom layer goes over a base, like your subfloor, and that base serves as the foundation for the liner. The first mortar layer gets put on at a slope. That slope helps to head the water to a drain, which is the other tricky part of a shower floor.
The drain contains two layers of drain holes. One you see in the floor. The other gets buried within the floor. It's a bit tricky to put in since it gets covered with the second and top mortar layer. How can drain holes get covered with mud and still be drain holes?
It's all part of the mystery. But the right way to look at tiling a shower floor is to just see it as a series of steps. There are several layers and several steps, but each step by itself is actually quite simple. Just understand the steps and then take one at a time and you get a leak-proof shower floor.
Tiling a shower can turn into a disaster. But if you look at it as just a layer by layer construction project, it can be done properly by many handy homeowners. Take time to understand each layer and completing the project will result in a shower that works just right.
See the problem is that tile floors leak including the one at the bottom of a shower. Unless the right steps happen, that leaky shower floor will cost somebody a lot of money, maybe more than you can imagine. What happens is the water that hits the floor seeps through both the grout lines and the tile itself to a lesser degree. That water just keeps slowly working it's way down and out.
A properly built shower floor catches that water with a built-in layer and funnels it down the drain. Within a masonry shower floor lies one layer that stands between the water and the rest of your house. Called a shower pan, what really stops the water is one sheet of a vinyl membrane that is built into the floor.
Really the waterproof layer gets sandwiched between a bottom layer of mortar and a tops layer of mortar. The bottom layer goes over a base, like your subfloor, and that base serves as the foundation for the liner. The first mortar layer gets put on at a slope. That slope helps to head the water to a drain, which is the other tricky part of a shower floor.
The drain contains two layers of drain holes. One you see in the floor. The other gets buried within the floor. It's a bit tricky to put in since it gets covered with the second and top mortar layer. How can drain holes get covered with mud and still be drain holes?
It's all part of the mystery. But the right way to look at tiling a shower floor is to just see it as a series of steps. There are several layers and several steps, but each step by itself is actually quite simple. Just understand the steps and then take one at a time and you get a leak-proof shower floor.
Tiling a shower can turn into a disaster. But if you look at it as just a layer by layer construction project, it can be done properly by many handy homeowners. Take time to understand each layer and completing the project will result in a shower that works just right.