Shower stall and flooring

Most of the backerboard for the shower is up. Wonderboard is the stuff Home Depot sells. There are other brands as well.

The shower valve is on it's way. I need to plumb it in before I can finish installing all of the backerboard.

I had not used it before but it's fairly easy to work with alone since it's only 5' x 3' sheets. To cut it you simply score it like drywall.

There are screws made specifically for it and you don't have to worry about pops the way you would for drywall. I had to put a sheet of drywall behind the board on the back wall (back of tub) because there was a gap that needed to be filled in so that the rockboard would be over the tub flange.

The side against the wall was okay and I only needed to mount the board without any sheetrock. The only difference between the two is that the backer board needs more screws so the spacing is closer together than sheetrock. The joints get taped and mudded with mortar. After that there is a waterproofing product that is painted on over the board. After that the tile is set.

Cement backer board in place

The floor is done with the same product but the area gets covered with mortar first then screwed to the subfloor. The mfg recommended 1/4" for the floor and 7/16" for the walls. It's a small bath and two sheets covered the floor. The walls will require five sheets. It's around eleven dollars per sheet so not too expensive.

The amount of mortar that was on the original floor was much thicker than the new material and that leaves the toilet flange sitting too high. That will need to be adjusted lower soon. It turns out that the pipe is what's known as a lead bend. In other words, the pipe through the floor down to the cast iron is lead. It is "wiped" with lead solder to the brass toilet ring. I'm not looking forward to installing a new ring. Not too many people know how to work with lead anymore but I did find one guy on Youtube who has a video on it.

Bare sub-floor

The old subfloor was in fairly decent shape so the original tile job was very good keeping the floor pretty much dry for the last forty years! These new products haven't even been around that long to find out if they hold up that long hopefully this floor and shower stall will hold up for the next twenty years.