Finally, the post you’ve all been waiting for, the one in which I introduce you to our new shower unit! Okay, so maybe you haven’t really been waiting for it, but here it is. Enjoy!
As I’ve mentioned before, our house needs a lot of work. One of the things that’s been bugging me the most since we first moved in is not having a working shower on the same floor as the master bedroom. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a shower unit in the master bathroom; there was, but it leaked, and was therefore unusable. This is what remained of the old shower:
Demolition started in our bathroom on October 11th. The first step in this project was to tear out the old shower. Since the shower walls were simply made up of tile affixed to sheet rock, this meant the whole wall had to come out.
Once we could see what we were working with, we went to the hardware store and bought the necessary plywood and durarock we’d need to replace the walls and flooring we had just ripped out. We cut the plywood to size and made a note of where the drain hole should be. That’s where we hit our first obstacle.
The old drain didn’t line up with the drain hole in the base of the shower unit we bought. This revelation threw a wrench into our plans, as it meant another trip to the hardware store to buy the piping needed to reroute the drain.
After another long day of work, we were able to successfully fix the drain issue, and lay down the base of the shower unit.
But not so fast! In order to lay down the base, we had to have the durarock walls in place, but before we could do that, we had to cut holes in the durarock for the shower head and knob. That’s when we realized that the shower head and knob attached to the wall didn’t line up with the holes in the shower unit.
So, we got to spend another day rerouting pipes, only this time, we got to play with a torch and soldering wire.
Dan, hard at work.
Once we got that piping issue sorted out, we were finally ready to install the base and walls of the new unit.
With the hard part over and done with, we just had to install the glass walls and sliding door. Easy, right?
Not really, especially if the directions that came with the shower unit had all the parts labeled wrong and some of the diagrams upside down.
But we prevailed and ultimately ended up with this:
After six long work days spread out over four weeks, we finally had a working shower unit! I no longer have to make the long journey from the 2nd floor down into the basement just to take a shower. Yay!
Though now the hard work really begins – picking a paint color for the bathroom walls!
Any suggestions?
* Special thanks to all our friends who donated their time and manly strength to this project. We love you!
