How to Tile a Shower Stall Video

Hi I'm Mark Donovan from HomeAdditionPlus.com and today I'm going to show you how to tile a custom shower.

The first thing we’re going to do is apply Tile Bucker Board Tape on all this seams that are associated with the cement bucker board.

So what we’re doing now is putting thin set mortar over the tape and you don’t need your really super fancy job here; just need to get it on so the tape is very well covered.

So now that we’ve taped the seams and put a layer of thin set mortar on top; we’ll let this dry and then we’ll be ready to start our actual tile job.

So what I’ve done is I’ve installed a ledger board near the bottom of the shower stall. Basically one tile high above the base of the shower pan. And what we’ll do is we’ve also drawn some vertical and horizontal lines to make sure that we keep our tile pattern going straight up the wall. And I'm also using these tile spacers to ensure above vertical and horizontal plumpness and straightness as I go up.

Once this tile has set after about 24 hours, I’ll remove the ledger and then put the final tile piece on the shower wall.

So what I’ve done is I’d mixed some thin set mortar with water for the manufacturer’s directions. As you can see that’s a nice pasty-like consistency. We’ll going to let this slick up for about 5 minutes and then we can actually begin to install it on the wall, and then apply the tile to it.

So now we’re applying the thin set mortar to the cement board; and we first put it on with the flat side of the trowel, and then turn it to a 45 degree angle; and run vertical notch lines. And then we do about anywhere from 8 to 10 square feet at a time so we don’t over do ourselves in that dried mortar by the time we put the tiles on it.

So we’ve finished the back wall and we’re now moving on to the one of the side walls; and again, we’re doing about four rows of a tile per section so then we don’t put too much thin set at any one time. And you have reasons spacers to ensure 1/8 inch base.

So we’re continuing up our third and final side of jar wall. And we’re just again simply laying the tile on top of the thin set border and putting in 1/8 inch spacers between each tile.

So now that we’ve put all the tile on the walls. We’re going to remove the ledger board and put the final row of tiles on the base of the shower stall area.

So I’ve put on the final row of tile on the base of the shower stall area, and I've taped it to the tile just above it that was previously put on and the mortar had set-up.

So now that we’ve completed putting the tile on the shower walls, we move to the floor.

For the tile of the shower floor I'm using 1 square sheet of 2x2 tiles that have a match on the backside. What we’re going to do is apply thin set mortar to the shower floor pan area using a 3-16th by 5-32nd inch notch trowel. And again, using a thin set mortar that made up here; and it’s kind of got a nice pasty consistency.

So before actually installing the tile floor into our shower stall area, we needed to first build a mortar shower pan, and that’s what I’ve got here. Basically it’s a flexible membrane liner that sandwich them between two layers of mortar.

And now what we’re going to do is simply apply it to seam coat where our layer of thin set mortar onto the shower floor pan, and then I’ll inset these tiles onto the shower floor pan.

So now I'm laying some thin set mortaring in trowel and again with a 3-16th by 5-32nd inch trowel—notch trowel.

Because this is such a small shower—only about 2 and half square feet; and I know it’s square; I'm starting at one corner working my way across. This has been a large surface area; I would have find from the straight horizontal and vertical accesses and start it from the middle out. But again, this is a small shower; we’re going to work from the corner edge across.

Now I’ve made my thin set mortar bed and now I’ll simply going to lay my 2 inch tile into the base of it and press down firmly.

You don’t want to use a really thick notch trowel, or else you wanted to have a thin set mortar come up and through the cracks.

The nice thing about these 1x1 sheets of tile is that they have automatically spaced so that you don’t have to just individually space every tile; just want to make sure that you have a nice consistent seam between these square sheets that’s consistent with this spacing on the other tiles that are in the center of the sheets.

Okay. So what I'm doing is working my way across the floor shower. I’ve cut out a square opening; we will go back and fill it later with individual tiles around this shower green assembly itself. And then along the wall, I'm checking the spacing—it’s just shy a foot so I'm basically going to have to cut a row of tiles approximately an inch off on the end to make sure we can fit nicely and have about an 8 inch gap up against the shower wall.

Alright, now that we’ve put in the shower floor tile everywhere except around the drain, all we’re doing is a nipping tile to put it in place nice and tight around the drain.

Alright, so what we’ve done on the curve is we’ve attached the outside tile pieces. This is a 12 inch wide tile pieces onto the front of the curve and now I’ve cut a couple top pieces to go on top and we’ll put thin set mortar in to hold them in place.

Alright, we’ve put our thin set mortar in, and now we’re simply going to drop these pieces of tiles into place—kind of pushing them nicely; make sure you’re out of gaps.

Now the thing too you want to keep in mind is that you want to make sure there’s a slight tilt toward the shower stall area so water won't run outside of the shower stall when it’s finished.

So we completed tiling the shower floor and the curve. We’ll let this set-up overnight and tomorrow we can come back and grab it.

Alright, so now we’re actually applying the grout to the joints. You want it at 45 degree angle across the corner to get the grout into the seams; and now basically I'm going to work our way down this wall and then move to the next wall. And after about 15 to 30 minutes of this setting here, we’ll wipe it down with a damp wet sponge.

Alright, so now that we’ve let the grout setup for about 15 minutes, I'm just gently going over it with my damp sponge; and I’ll be getting a few swipes of it before I have to rinse it again.

So that about does it for tiling your shower. We’ll let the grout lines setup for about 48 hours then come back and seal them with a grout sealer to preventing mold and melded growth on the grout lines and then apply the final - to the other side of the edges of the tile.

If you want more detailed instructions on tiling your shower, visit HomeAdditionPlus.com and look for out Tiling Your Shower e-book.