One Room Challenge Week 3 Bathroom Progress: Installing A Custom Shower

It’s Week 3 of the One Room Challenge and we’re moving right along! The goal for this week was to make big progress on the shower + start installing tile. Since last week, Ty fully installed the shower, which included: hanging the cement board, taped and mortared the seams and waterproofed everything. I do want to say that this is not a beginner DIY project and took a lot of researching and time to install the shower correctly. Whenever you’re dealing with water, you want to be 1000% sure that you’re building your project with integrity so as to avoid any major issues down the line.

We encourage doing your due diligence before tackling a project of this size; here are two videos that were particularly helpful to us when planning this project:

How To Build A Shower
How to Install Cement Board for Beginners

When designing this bathroom we decided to make the most of the space and opted for a fully custom shower as opposed to a prefab pan or tub insert. We didn’t want to pour our own shower pan, so we ordered a pre-poured pan ensuring that the slope would be exactly right for correct draining and easier tile laying. You can order these in any size possible to fit your space. You do need to have the shower pan before framing up your shower walls so that it fits exactly and doesn’t have a lot of movement once installed. Here is the brand we went with:

Once the pan was installed it was time to hang the walls. The shower walls are made of cement board, which was then taped and mortared to seal all seams. Again – you want to cut off any access water may have to get behind your walls or flooring, causing damage.

After the walls were installed it was time to fully waterproof the shower with an isolation membrane (if you’ve ever seen bright red or teal colored bathroom or shower walls, you know exactly what I’m talking about). You brush or roll it on just like paint. Here is the brand we used:

Now to the good part: tile! I love tile. Different surfaces and materials make a space interesting, layered and warm, so in bathrooms I think it’s all about the mix. For the shower floor I opted for a brick marble mosaic tile, 4 x 4 ceramic tile on the walls, a pretty marble trim to frame the shower opening and a stone-look brick herringbone on the rest of the bathroom floor (all linked at the end of this post).

Before busting out the adhesive and laying your first tile, it’s very important to dry-fit your tile. This helps avoid waste, reduce difficult tile cuts and ensures that the tile is laid in an even and correctly balanced way ( for example: when laying wall tile [like a back splash or shower wall] you want to start your tile in the middle of the wall, working outwards, rather than starting on one end).

Ty finished up dry-fitting the shower floor tile late last night and I’m in love with the way it looks. We will set this tonight and start work on the shower walls over the weekend. It feels really good to be making visible progress on the shower and is a much needed milestone to remind us it will actually be a bathroom again one day!

You can shop all of our tile below:

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As we head into Week 4 we have a lot to accomplish. The goals for this week are: finishing the shower, paint for the walls & vanity and installing the light fixtures. I share videos in stories daily of where we are on the progress, so you can follow along there as well. And be sure to check out the other One Room Challenge participants and their progress here!