shower drain

The shower build is very slowly progressing. We gave up on the two-piece shower drain purchased at the Despot and opted instead for a three-piece drain that we picked up at the local super-awesome plumbing parts store.

What's the difference? Well, when build your own shower pan (base of shower) like we are, you need to use a flexible rubber liner to funnel water that seeps through your tiles back towards the drain. With a 3-piece drain, the membrane is sandwiched in place before the mortar bed goes in. With a 2-piece drain, there's nothing holding your membrane down but adhesive.

Anywho. Step one was to cut a hole in the floor for the drain.

I have to admit, that hurt. We had gone to all the trouble of installing a beautiful new hole-free subfloor, and now we're cutting into it? *weep!* It's a very nice hole, though.

Once the hole was cut, the drain could be set in place and the ABS pipe connected from the bottom.

Sorry for the blurry photo. It's tricky taking decent shots when you're blindly reaching your arm through the trap door into the poo-hole beneath the cottage.

With the ABS dry-fitted, it was time to cement it all into place. Please enjoy this photo of the back of the captain's head.

Et voila! C'est magnifique, no?

It's not actually blue, that's just a protective plastic coating on the metal. The orange ring is the top of the membrane sandwich, and the black is the bottom. This will all be hidden beneath the tiles.

Next steps:

Mark level around the shower and factor in a slope of 1/4" for each foot away from the drain. This will be trickier than it sounds considering the shower subfloor already slopes 1.5" over 4 ft.  Oh, I wish I were kidding. *sigh*

Math makes my brain itch. Did you know that?

Once the top of the slope is marked around the perimeter of the shower we can mix the sand pack and start to shape the shower floor. This part has me nervous. If we screw it up, the shower won't drain properly and water will pool. That will make me loco.  And we're dealing with cement here, which isn't really something you can easily scrap and start over with. I can handle everything else about the shower build, but this bit has me tugging my collar.

Pray for me*.

---

*no. not really.