Bathroom
Everything that happens before a shower looks like a shower
Concrete out, drain centred, walls framed, board sealed, mud bed floated. None of it survives into the finished room, and all of it is what keeps water where it belongs.
3 min read
A finished shower is a simple-looking object. Tile, glass, a drain. The reason a good one lasts twenty years and a poor one fails in three has almost nothing to do with any of those, and everything to do with a sequence you never see.
Demolition, then the drain
Old tile comes out, and on a slab that usually means removing concrete with it. Loud, dusty, and the least subtle day of the job.
Then the drain gets positioned, and everything else is set from it. The plumbing is worked out around where the drain lands, not the other way round. Get that wrong and every measurement after it inherits the error.
Framing and board
Any new geometry gets framed at this point: a pony wall, a bench, a niche. Then drywall goes on outside the wet area, waterproof backer board goes on inside it, and the board is sealed at every seam and fastener.
That is the actual waterproofing layer. The tile on top of it is a wearing surface and a finish. It is not what keeps water out of your wall.
The mud bed and the screed lines
The pan itself is a mud bed, floated by hand so it falls evenly toward the drain. A border gets established around the perimeter first, then screed marks across the middle, then the space between them is filled to match.
It is checked with a four-foot level, then a shorter one, then a torpedo level in the corners. Not because the first reading was wrong, but because a floor can be true across four feet and still be off across the whole pan. The drain grate stays covered throughout, because debris in a drain during construction is a problem you discover much later.
Then it waits
The mud bed cures before anything goes on top of it, and the waterproofing over it cures before tile is set. Those waits are not slack in the programme, they are the programme.
When a shower takes longer than a homeowner expected, this is almost always where the time went. It is also why the tile still looks right several years later.
