A Tiled Shower's Floor

This is the third post in a series about how to tile a shower. To see the rest of the posts you can always click on the "Tiled Shower" link in the GoTo menu at the top. Here is the link:

http://diyda.blogspot.com/search/label/Tiled%20Shower

With the shower completely demolished to the studs I was able to measure for the correct shower pan. At the bottom of the shower stall, I measured from stud to stud and found that a 32" by 32" pan would fit perfectly. If you have a pre-existing shower stall the odds are it was built to a standard size. After doing some hunting around on the internet I found that swanstone made a composite pan that would work nicely for my project. $110 later it was on its way to my house. Swanstone can be found at http://www.swanstone.com and the link to the shower pan that I used is here: http://www.swanstone.com/products/showerWallsFloors/singleThreshold/index.php

In the meantime I went about making a solid base for the pan. The previous owner had decided to just nail down whatever left over plywood they could find as a subfloor and this had not been as sturdy as I would have liked. In order to remedy this I went to Lowes and found a 3/4" thick piece of plywood that was 48"x48". I cut this into a 32"x 32" square and then test fitted it in the floor. Seeing that it worked well I measured the shower stall for the center of the drain and transferred this measurement to the piece of plywood. Once I had the center of the drain I used a compass to draw a 6" diameter hole which I would cut out with a jigsaw. This made for one solid piece of subfloor that I leveled with a few shims and then screwed down.

A note on the subfloor: You want to make sure this is level in all directions. If it is not, then the water will not drain into the center of the pan and out of the shower. This will leave you with left over moisture in the shower stall that can lead to mildew and mold. Use shims to level before screwing the floor down.

In the next post, I will outline the steps taken to install the shower pan.