Saturday, November 8, 2008

Garden Tub/Shower Conversion Part 1

This one was tricky. This was originally a garden tub; not meant to be a full on shower. There used to be a big gap between the top of the tub and the walls. If you tried to use is as a shower, water would collect in this gap and you couldn't get it out. So eventually this was would get really nasty. My solution was to bring the walls to the tub. The back wall has 2 layers of Durock. So the tile is about 3/4 of an inch away from the back wall. It looks cool. You can't see it in the pictures too well, but it adds dimension. That extra Durock wasn't enough so I decided to lay the bottom row of tiles on the tub and lean them against the walls. This way, the water can run down the walls and onto the surface of the tub and eventually find it's way to the drain. 
On the front end of the shower, I butted the tile into the door trim.
On the back of the shower, I used bullnose to finnish the edge. I also used bullnose to cap off the edges of the leaning tiles. This was unorthodox but effective for what I was trying to achieve. 
The soap dishes were made out of the field tile and capped off with bullnose.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks so much for this info. We were just about to give up hope for installing a "drop in" but in our shower enclosure because of the water pooling issue...but this looks like a great solution! ;-)