July 30, 2011

Nice Shower Niche!

With the three day weekend over July 4th, we were sure that we were going to finish tiling our shower. Sigh. So close, and yet, it's still not finished. At this point, the few tiles we have left to put in place all require careful measuring and cutting, so it's slow going (at least for us first-timers). But we're moving forward, and we've scheduled the glass fabricators to come out and measure next week - that'll motivate us to finish for sure!

Even though we still have to make a few tricky cuts, the most difficult part is actually finished! We spent last weekend working on the niche, which took us way longer than I'd like to admit... The first step was to determine exactly where the niche would be located so that all of the tiles and grout lines would be matched up. We put two rows of tile in place to get the overall height, and then added in the thickness of the shelves and niche tiles to figure out how big the hole needed to be.


Don't mind the tiles on the left hand side that fell off the wall while we were cutting the hole - that's perfectly normal. Just kidding! We were still figuring out the whole thinset mortar thing.  Next, we built out the niche walls using cement board so that it was the exact width we'd need. We waterproofed using the same Kerdi material that we used for the rest of the shower, following the instructions over on the Floor Elf's tiling blog. After that, we made some cuts to our border tiles, slapped them up on the wall, and got to the pretty glass tile part. Finally.


The finish line is in sight!