Construction - Shower
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We have added in some background on the shower as it is one of the more unusual features of the house and has taken a great deal of work to construct.
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Strengthening the Slab
Additional thickening and strengthening was required under the shower area to support the weight of the brickwork. There turned out to be 600 bricks in it. On top of this we had 12m2 of tiles and rendering - a lot of weight!
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Starting the Brickwork
The bricklayers starting work on the shower.
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The Completed Core
The shower ended up taking 600 bricks. It seems huge standing inside it.
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Rendering
Our rendering skills were put to the test on the shower. This was our first official rendering job and was also the hardest given the round wall.
It took the whole day to do the outside. We'll work on the inside after our arms recover!!
We put two 10mm skins on and then finished with a top coat to get the surface smooth.
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Plumbing
The shower a bit more completed! The plumbing is in but we haven't put the skylight in yet.
Once the showerheads were installed, we rendered over this and then tiled the inside. We plan to paint the outside wall.
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Tiling
On the home stretch as the tiler finally gets to start on the tiles.
He did a fantastic job especially given how fiddly it was to line everything up. He was very exacting and the alignment was spot on!
Finished!
The first picture is looking back into the shower. You can just see the skylight in the roof. The second picture shows the hand shower, the two normal heads are off to each side and can't be seen in this picture. We went for black tiles with a stainless steel decorative strip down either side of the hand held shower. The effect is quite dramatic!
Tips and Tricks
- What can we suggest!!! There aren't many round showers : )
- Water proof! Most waterproofers only tile the edges and the floor as per Australian Standards. This is enough for them to issue a certificate. You can buy waterproofing from a hardware or tile shop and finish the job. They will do it for you but charge an arm and a leg.
- Flexible metal track and metal studs may have been an easier (and possibly cheaper) option. At least we can use it as a bomb shelter!
- We tiled the inside of the shower with mosaics (45mm x 45mm). It took almost 5,000 (nearly 12 square metres) tiles to finish the job.
- Ensure that your plumbing fittings are square to the wall (this is of course hard in a round shower!). We used taps with a screw on cover. If the fitting were not square to the wall we would not have been able to fit the cover tightly against the tiles. We had to dig out a couple of them and bend them straight.
- As we had rendered the inside of the shower (so we had an even surface for the tiles) we wanted to ensure that NO water would get to it so we waterproofed all walls and floor. Normally only the edges and floor are done.
- Get a good tiler!! We used Tony de Vries from Simply Ceramics and he was excellent. There was a lot of work in getting the shower just right and we don't believe that most tilers would have put in as much effort as Tony did :)
