Build Your Own Shower Pan

Build Your Own Shower Pan – So the Mustache family now lives happily in a little vacation suite I built for us with the invaluable help of my friend and host Johnny Aloha. There’s still some work to be added (including paint) but for the most part everything works now.

The most beautiful part of this place is the shower you see in the picture on the left. Oh, ah.. looks cozy, doesn’t it? Anyway, I like it and wanted to build something that would act as a centerpiece for this future rental unit, anchoring it in the luxury market and thus allowing it to fetch higher rents forever.

Build Your Own Shower Pan

The cool part is that it cost absolutely nothing to build. It’s floor-to-ceiling travertine tiles, dark slate, river rock floor stones, and even the handle and valve set were found on Craigslist at a great discount. A shampoo corner that keeps your spouse’s razors from messing up your personal space is just a few extra cuts on the tile saw. The sloping pan that funnels the water down the drain was custom-made from a mix of plain old concrete and masonry, even at the cost of an off-the-shelf plastic shower tray. Still, the whole thing only took a few days of work to create from blank plywood and pegboard (which in turn I made from even more blank paper that was previously unused space in their storage room).

Shower Threshold Height

A nice shower can add $10,000 or more to the value of a home in a nice neighborhood. It’s also very nice to use even if you don’t plan on selling your house – I built a similar shower in my house and we’ve really enjoyed it over the last few years. But if you ask a bathroom contractor to do one of these things for you, you’ll often end up with a price tag of $5,000 or more, and as a result, most of us end up showering in metal tubs or plastic showers that are covered in old mold. white tiles.

The key to this whole deal is a feature called a “spill-in shower pan.” It’s an obscure black op creation that almost no one in this country knows how to build, which is why you see so many plastic showers. Some professional tile installers can do this, but they will charge you a lot of money and still may not turn out the way you want. But once you’ve unlocked its secrets, you’re free to build shower pans of any shape or size for a surprisingly low price (around $60 including drain and waterproofing*). And today I’m going to show you how to make one.

The basic idea is this: we make an absolutely waterproof concrete bowl with drainage in the middle.

Look for two pieces of drain like this. This type is designed to fit around a plastic shower panel, but it works fine for our purposes (you just don’t need a rubber seal) (Image credit/hand model: Mike)

How To Build A Tile Shower Floor

There will usually be a raised “curb” around the edge and a nice tile or stone surface above the concrete. After you have finished the bowl, arranged it and laid the tiles, move on to tiling the rest of the shower walls. But it all starts with a molded shower pan.

The easiest way to do this is to make a curb first. This involves creating a wooden shape and filling it with concrete. I usually make these things 5″ tall and 4″ thick, so you just cut two 5″ boards to length, attach them to the floor and walls as needed, making sure there is a 4″ space between them.

Here’s an example of an irregularly shaped corner I made for a shower in a small bathroom at The Foreclosure Project last year:

Note that for added strength in this case, I installed several large 4″ floor screws in each joint and ran some steel reinforcing wire along the center of the form to create more tensile strength (and therefore crack resistance) in the finished form. It’s not usually necessary, I just find it fun to make powerful concrete things. The black stuff at the bottom is roofing paper – just to insulate the concrete from the plywood so that the wet concrete doesn’t seep onto the floor. General good practice for concrete on timber.

Cost To Install Or Replace A Shower Pan (tile, Custom, Hot Mop)

If you are also doing drain plumbing, you will want the drain pipe to end at the plywood floor so that it is about 2″ above the floor when glued to the shower drain. So when we pour the concrete in the next step, the minimum thickness will be 2″.

This is where things get interesting and this article will hopefully save DIY shower builders time and money. In the old days (and still most today) cast shower pans were made in three steps: cast in the pre-slope, rubber liner, then cast in the top slope. It looked like this:

The thing is, the old method hasn’t been updated to reflect a newer invention: skirted waterproofing materials like Redguard and Aquaguard. This material is basically liquid rubber in a bucket and it overcomes the old drawback of rubber by combining complete waterproofing with a surface that you can attach tiles directly to. With the new technology, you can skip one layer of concrete and end up with the following:

Note that this method is something I more or less invented to try and get confused by the product’s poorly written technical documentation. The tile installers I know still do it the old fashioned way and some may scoff at the innovation. But I’ve built at least 20 of these showers now, and I can still look down on the oldest one and check for perfectly dry wood underneath – no leaks. It would be practically impossible for this design

How To Slope A Shower Floor With Mortar: A Pro Guide

Now that you understand the basics, let’s take a look at some action pictures to show the molding, molding, and waterproofing in detail.

Your drain surface should be about 2″ off the floor. To create a uniform slope, use a ruler or level to draw a line around the entire perimeter of the shower panel that is about 2.75″ off the floor. This will provide a 3/4″ slope for the water to flow down the drain.

You will need a fairly dry (almost crumbly) mixture of cement. But not ordinary concrete with gravel aggregate, here we use a mason’s mix, which is just portland cement and sand – the same material used for brick mortar. Available in the store next to the regular concrete parks. About three 80 lb (36 kg) bags will fit a 32″x48″ shower.

Mix the cement outside in a cart one bag at a time and bring it into the house in a 5-gallon bucket. Throw it in your future shower and it will look like this:

How To Make A Shower Pan (with Pictures)

Throw it around. Note that the removable/adjustable top of the drain is removed for this step. But tape the rest of the drain to avoid trapping the concrete!

From here it’s all smooth – use various straight edges to scrape and smooth the concrete, add more bags until you’ve got a nice smooth bowl:

When it starts to look smooth, I shine a flashlight horizontally across the surface to highlight any bumps and undulations that can be scraped and re-smoothed:

Done in less than a week), you have a solid piece of smooth concrete that theoretically already drains water directly down the drain. But we want even better waterproofing and with that you are ready for the Redguard step. This goes right over the concrete, the edge of the drainage plastic, and several feet of walls. You can then screw in the last drain top that you cut to match the finished tiles like this:

How To Build Basement Curbless Showers

After drying, you go back to standard tile work: first make the floor and lay it (for more waterproofing), then take the walls on the walls the next day. I don’t have the space in this article to explain the whole art of shower tiling, but maybe someday I’ll have the opportunity to work with you personally on one of these things.

A Poured Showerpan may seem like a daunting and daunting task, but the whole thing is about 4 hours of work from start to finish, once you get the wrinkles done (and still under 8, even the first time). After that, it will take another 8-16 hours to tile and grout the rest of the shower and its curbs. For many DIY home renovators, learning this skill is an investment with huge returns.

If this shower makes our new hire over $100 a month, it will provide the equivalent cash flow of a $30,000 investment yielding 4%.

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