If At First You Don't Succeed...A Shower Floor Tale

THE RAVENNA HOUSE Here's what our new basement bathroom looked like about a month ago.  It only took the gestational period of a baby (42 weeks in Wilder's case) to get it looking like this, so we are proud of our DIY efforts.

And here's what the room looked like a couple of weeks later:

Confused?  You should be!  Saws and masks don't belong in a room that has just been renovated!  But so this tale goes.  And here's the part where I pull out that well-used saying...if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And that's just what we did.

See we didn't slope the shower floor properly, so water ran away from the drain instead of into it.  But only in one small-ish area.  When we took that first, long-awaited shower it was with about one inch of standing water on the floor.

Frustrating to say the least.

Turns out there's nothing much to be done about an improperly-draining shower floor besides re-doing it.  So we ripped it out and try, tried again.  Let's walk through the process from start to finish.

Step 1: Rip up the tiles on the offending area.  Oh my this was a lot harder to do then it sounds...I just couldn't help but think, why didn't we do this right the first time?!

Ugly, isn't it?!

Step 2: Re-slope the sub-floor with mortar

Step 3: Re-tile the shower floor.

Step 4: Rip up more area and re-tile to make double, triple, quadruple sure that we had the right slope.

When we started laying the new tile, we noticed that the new section was quite a bit higher than the old.  I was pretty worried we'd end up with a still-improperty-draining shower floor situation and we'd have to rip it out again.  And that sounded worse and more embarrassing than sweeping the driveway in nothing but your underwear and cowboy boots (see photo below), so Garrett pulled up more tiles and then laid new ones all the way to the wall.  The picture below illustrates the expanded area.  The original fix area is the bold box, and the arrows show the extent of our expansion.  Please forgive the rudimentary drawing - my online photo editing skills are a bit suspect...

 Step 5: Grout the new tiles, wash, and seal.

And we're done.  Again.  It's not perfect, but it drains properly, so I'm a happy DIY-er.

Moral of the story?  Do it right the first time.  And more specifically, when you're tiling a shower floor, make sure you get a good slope to your subfloor.  Spending the extra time on this step could save you a whole lot of time and money and frustration down the road.  Especially frustration.  There's nothing worse then doing the same job twice.  Right?  Except maybe having a mama who let's you go outside with only a diaper and cowboy boots on (the picture is coming...).  Or being a blogger who finishes a bathroom renovation and doesn't do a reveal post for two plus months (a situation I totally plan on rectifying soon).  

Have you guys ever messed up a DIY this bad?  Probably not.  But if you have, please share...make me feel better about myself!

xoxo

p.s.  Thank the heavens, Catherine has a new old house to renovate!  Best. News. Ever!

p.p.s. Every year we spend Labor Day at the Ellensburg Rodeo.  It's a tradition I have every intention of passing down to the next generation.  And I'm pretty sure Wilder is on board.  Well at least he's excited about his first pair of cowboy boots...an interest that does not extend to clothes, apparently.

p.p.p.s. I just started reading this book.  Sadly it's my first summer read and we're at the unofficial end of summer.  I'm already addicted to the TV series (so much so I bought Starz for a year...don't tell Garrett).