Installing a Shower
Dominic Vautier
03/2021
I
have installed several showers in my day but the one in the basement by
my son’s room took quite a lot of extra work.
It involved so many changes.
We had a claw-foot cast iron tub there before but it was kind of
ugly and not very useful. We decided to get a square corner glass door
shower and selected a good kit from Home Depot.
My main interest was getting a strong solid base and flat glass for ease
of cleaning. The shower was
a roomy 34 inches square. The
base was heavy fiberglass.
The two corner walls
needed to be 38 inches so the left hand faucet wall had to be extended out
about 8 inches to accommodate the unit.
The plumbing had to be rearranged because both the shower valve and
nozzle were in the wrong place because they were used for a tub.
I had a lot of work to do.
First
of all we removed the tub and tore out the wall to see what kind of
plumbing had to be done. Before
I did any plumbing work I did some serious planning on how to best get
all the solder joints hooked up. All
went well and we had no leaks.
My son helped me check all the soldering.
Then there were the walls.
One wall had to be extended and the other wall had to be fitted
with wood backing at the 34 inch line so that the enclosure could be
solidly mounted. The
electrical fixtures had to be relocated as well.
The
drain had to be moved over about 10 inches so this is where I got an
opportunity to use my rotary hammer. I
cut out a channel in the cement just enough to accommodate the PCV pipe.
Here I am with my trusty
roto-hammer.
I
had to do a lot of rehearsing when I installed the shower base because it
has to be set in mortar whereas the drain line uses a quick drying PVC
cement. So I had about 3
minutes to get it right. I
first dry fitted the PVC drain and marked each pipe before laying the
mortar. This had to be done
while making sure the base was flat. It
was then left for 24 hours with a bunch of weights so the mortar could
set.
Next I installed the two
surrounds. Working with
flexible plastic surrounds is awful. It’s like working with a dead limp
body. There is no glue in existence strong enough or quick setting enough
to hold those wiggly surrounds in place long enough to stay.
I had to get the strongest Gorilla construction adhesive on the
market and brace each surround for 24 hours so they could dry. In fact the
extra strong Gorilla adhesive is so strong it won’t come out of a
calking gun.
I had to test mount the two glass
panels before I secured the profiles.
The profiles are the wall rails that attach the glass to the walls.
They have to be plumb to fit. There was about a half inch allowance
on the profiles. I rebuilt one
wall plumb. The other wall was
off one-fourth inch.
With
one of my son’s help I was able to easily fit the glass panels.
