Mortar bed

Does it feel like the bathroom renovation is creeping along? That's probably because it is. Slowly, slowly, inching towards completion. We've been at it for months, one weekend at a time.

We recently started the shower stall. The framing is in and the plumbing is installed.

Next up is the shower floor. Building a custom shower stall is a long and tedious process with many steps. Twenty six steps, actually, according to the Home Depot Plumbing book, with many broad, sweeping steps like "prepare the floor" or "tile the walls". Fully half of them are about water impermeability; redundant moisture barriers to keep the water in the shower.

The first step of the shower floor is to get the drain installed. Check.

Next you need to mark the shower stall for level. You want the floor to slope up as you move away from the drain so that water is funneled into the drain. Makes sense. It makes sense as long as you have a relatively level floor to begin with. The floor in the cottage bathroom happens to slope 2" over 4 ft. *face palm*

This is me marking "level" around the shower base; the point at which the shower floor is level with the drain. Please note: this was impossible on the left hand side because the wall was already above level on that side.

Once you mark level around  the shower, you go around again and mark the finished height of the mortar bed; this will be raised 1/4" from level for every 1 ft you travel from the drain. For my 4-ft.-wide shower with the drain in the centre, we travel 2 ft. from the drain to the wall, so I added half an inch. Now that I think about it, I only needed to add 3/8ths of an inch on the front-to-back slope, but I think I marked it for 1/2 an inch all around. I hope the shower-base police aren't reading this! That 1/8th of an inch will make a huge difference. Not.

So, once level is marked and you've added another mark for the finished height of the mortar bed, it's time to start making snow balls. Mortar balls. When you mix up your Sand Mix concrete (Sacrete Sand Mix), at this stage it's called a dry pack. There should only be enough moisture in the concrete to enable you to form balls of concrete in your hands - like a snowball. Pack-y, but not wet. Make sense?

Dump the dry pack into the shower base and commence screeding.

The captain's new favourite word: Screed. That and slake. Screed and Slake. Slake and Screed.

We needed to add one-and-a-half inches of concrete on the right-hand side just to bring the floor height up to the right level.

We had not factored this into our Sand Mix calculations, and we ran out on the left-hand side of the shower. Dangit. Please thank the captain for this charming picture of my butt. Thanks.

Fortunately this is the side of the shower that's already above level, so the overall grade still slopes down to the drain. We had hoped to put a 1/4" token layer of dry pack here, but there just wasn't enough. As best as I could, I tapered the dry pack off to nothing. It's pretty coarse stuff, though so it wasn't without a bit of a lip. *bites knuckle* I'm hoping I can bodge the rest at the next level.

Why, why, why isn't there a Despot on the island?