NOT just an accent

Glass! Awesome! (I like glass tile…)

It is, however, fairly spendy. It is also a highly specialized installation when used for the whole installation. You need to understand the type of glass (there are three different manufacturing processes), acceptable processes, proper installation procedures and what type of glass can be used where.

It’s a lot.

So when you’ve found that perfect glass tile that would look great in your shower three things will happen:

1. You will look at the price and multiply that by the square footage of your shower
2. You will immediately go into shock
3. You will decide that maybe a porcelain shower will look okay after all…

However (!), you don’t need to give up on that glass tile just yet. You can simply buy a few square feet and use it as an accent in your (now much less expensive) shower. I regularly use glass mosaic tile as an accent row or inserts in tile installations.

There are several reasons this is a better idea.

• You don’t really need to know every technicality of your particular glass tile (unless you want to use it on a floor!). With small strips or inserts the dimensional stability of the glass (which is a huge issue in large applications) is negligible. You still need to take it into account to an extent, but you don’t need a tile contractor’s education on glass tile to successfully install it.
• Most glass mosaics can be cut apart to the size you need. If your wall tile is only an inch short you can simply add another row of the mosaic rather than shifting your entire installation up or down. This saves you time and effort in making the layout fit properly.
• You won’t spend nearly as much for the installation materials. This leaves you more money for beer new rubber duckies!
• It will turn a plain installation into a very nice, classy project. And who doesn’t want everyone to believe know they’re classy? I mean besides me…

Just like that little (?) bathroom up there on the right. That entire bathroom is just beige travertine. That’s it. However, when I added the glass ‘waterfall’ and the diagonal inserts it turned it into a very, very nice master bathroom.

And here’s another.  This one has even more expensive mosaics – it’s glass and metal. As well as having the mosaics I took the 12 x 24 inch porcelain tile and cut every other row in half. So rather than a plain white porcelain shower it is now a very unique installation which stands out from all others (you can click on it for a full-size example of my horrible photography skills).

There are two basic shapes of glass mosaics (although you can find them in nearly any shape). You have the small square ones, which you can use for the diagonal inserts, or the long, rectangular bar mosaics, which are normally only used for liners like the waterfall stripe and a liner insert. The latter can not normally be cut into squares.

The biggest problem with using glass mosaics for an accent is the thickness difference between the regular wall tile and the glass. The wall tile is normally thicker. If you know how to resolve this it isn’t an issue. You can also get an accent tile like a pencil rail, which is a half-circle, to frame out the glass. If you do that the thickness difference will not be an issue, it won’t even be noticed (unless you invite a tile guy to dinner). Like this one here.

You can also have a focal point in your installation like tiling the back of a niche, like behind that tub there, with the mosaics.

You will also want to use white thinset to install them. If you use the regular gray thinset it may show through the glass and make them look splotchy or dingy – even with darker mosaics!

Yes, both splotchy and dingy are technical terms.

You can even get creative with your design. Nearly anything you do with a glass tile mosaic in your installation will make it stand apart from a regular, boring installation.

The possibilities for glass tile mosaic use in your installation are only limited by your imagination. You can still let your imagination run wild without cutting into the beer vacation money. If you find that perfect mosaic and find a wall tile that matches it well you can have a very nice installation for considerably less money.

Need help with design questions or basic layout of your tile project? Check out FloorElf’s Design Manual. It includes basic layout, correct installation and balance as well as a LOT of photos and design ideas.

You can click on any of the photos below for a larger version.

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72 hours.

That’s the answer to your question. 72 hours. Three days.

Your question, by the way, is ‘Now that I have my linear drain in and my shower deck fabricated how long do I have to wait before installing my Laticrete HydroBan to waterproof everything?’

That’s a great question!

72 hours.

If you don’t yet have your linear drain installed and your mud deck fabricated – you’re in luck! You have time to do that. Go read this first: Installing a Laticrete linear drain (part 1)

Then you can go on that three day bender vacation.

‘Why 72 hours?’, you may ask. Also a great question. Negative hydrostatic pressure.

‘What is that?’, you may ask.

You’re getting me off track here, stop with the questions. I haven’t yet written that post. The short answer is vapor dissipation from your mud deck putting pressure on the back of your membrane which may cause it to become unbonded. So don’t do that. Let’s move on…

Now that you’ve installed your drain flange (the lower portion of the drain) and created your shower floor you need to waterproof it. Being that the drain is actually called the Laticrete HydroBan linear drain – we’re gonna do that with Laticrete HydroBan.

Hydroban is an elastomeric liquid membrane which is brushed, rolled or troweled onto your substrate to waterproof it.

My preferred method is a trowel. I use a 1/4″ x 1/4″ v-notch trowel and install my first layer with the notched side then let it cure. This will leave about 1/4″ ridges on your substrate with cured waterproofing membrane. With hydroban you are able to install your second layer after only 2 hours! The second layer is then installed with the flat side of the trowel, essentially filling in the ridges.

The membrane is painted up onto the edges of the drain flange (all outside, horizontal edges) and creates a single seamless waterproofing layer for your shower floor right into your drain.

After that cures you have a waterproof membrane with the proper thickness and you can begin installing your tile.

If you’ve read the first part (and if not – why not???) you know there were a couple of idiosyncrasies in this shower I needed to deal with, all due to the width of the shower. One of them was the need to have the drain flange run under the wall substrate – cutting the wall so it actually sits inside the drain.

With hydroban this is not a problem! You’re able to paint the membrane up and into the drain over the floor and down the wall, seal it at the bottom where the substrate is inside the drain, and continue it out into the drain a bit. This creates a single, continuous layer of waterproofing from the wall into the drain pan. You don’t need to worry about any water getting to the bottom of, or behind, your substrate. A perfect product to create a perfect solution in a great many installations.

Since we’re working with the tile-in version of the drain, and it’s currently just steel, we need to put something on it to allow the tile to properly bond to the steel. Guess what we’re gonna use for that.

That’s right – HydroBan. Good guess…

The HydroBan will bond (tenaciously so) to the steel, and the thinset will bond to the hydroban. Almost like the whole system was made to work together, right?

All you need to do is brush a couple layers of HydroBan into the drain grate channel and let it cure. It doesn’t necessarily need to be absolute full coverage – no need to waterproof it. You’re more concerned with creating a proper substrate to bond the tile. Once cured the HydroBan will do that very well.

With this particular shower I’m doing a complete custom mosaic floor with flat river rock. The best way to get this type of tile into the drain is to first arrange the rock into the grate and get it where you want it, then flip it upside down and pull the grate off. You should be left with just the line of upside down mosaics in the shape of the drain. Then install thinset into the drain grate and flip it back over the mosaics. When you pull it up you should have the mosaics in the drain grate in the proper placement and all flat and level on the top. Like this:

Once that cures you’re all set. The tile or mosaics in the drain grate get grouted just like the rest of your tile. It is removable for maintenance and, when in place, is nice and solid and blends into the installation.

Although I’ve used the mosaic river rock on this installation the use of a Laticrete linear drain allows the use of any size tile you want. If I wanted to install a single 3 foot by 3 foot tile on the shower floor I could have (don’t do that – it’s slippery). The single, flat plane allows you to take your installation and design from wall to wall, including your shower, in the entire bathroom without breaking it up with the smaller mosaics required for a regular concave shower deck.

Linear drains are one of the best products to become readily available in the last few years. They are extremely popular and becoming more in demand every year. They are, in my opinion, heading toward becoming the standard for custom showers in the near future. Laticrete has made them available with a fine product and coupled the use with one of their quality membranes to become a complete integrated system which is extremely easy to install.

I have installed these drains from five different manufacturers and Laticrete is, BY FAR, the easiest, quickest and most straight-forward installation. It is a painless installation and always sets any installation apart from every other diy shower around. Get one! You won’t regret it. If you don’t, well, every time you stare at that little round drain grate in the shallow bowl of your shower floor you’ll kick yourself.

Due to several requests I will now answer the question that seems to be absolutely baffling everyone that has read either of these posts: Yes, one wall in the bathroom is painted green and the other is painted pink. It’s paint. You don’t want to get HydroBan near that other pink waterproofing. The HydroBan beats it up and takes its lunch money. Besides, I tiled over that pink wall with glass.

It looks better now.

You can click on any of the photos below to view a full-size version.

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The wonderful folks at Laticrete sent me a linear drain to play with. And you know me – I bastardized it until it was virtually unrecognizable, ran it through the paces and did things you really shouldn’t do with nice, high-end products like this.

And it survived. Word on the street is that they read my blog, probably for comic relief and to instruct people what NOT to do with their products. So I’m sure they knew this when they sent it… I mean honestly, I soaked their grout in cherry Kool-aid for a week, how could they NOT know?

I did, however, put it to good use in a very cool shower. This is a brief overview of the installation of that drain.

Laticrete HydroBan linear drains are topical drains intended for use with the Hydro Ban liquid waterproofing membrane. They are available in 24″(61cm), 32″(81 cm), 36″(91 cm), 42″(107cm) and 60″(152 cm) lengths. They are also available with a brushed steel grate or a tile-in option.

I had the 36″ tile-in version. The tile-in version allows you to install the same tile in the grate of the drain which, when completed, allows the drain to be nearly invisible in the installation.

You can visit Laticrete’s linear drain information page for a short video on how it is (technically) supposed to be installed.

We all know that’s not what I did. Well, I did, except for one small issue. In the real world application of any product you may need to adapt or tweak something to make it fit or function as it should. This does not always happen! In fact, it rarely happens. I only point it out because with this particular installation I needed to do that with one small part. No big deal.

It usually means you’ll lose your manufacturer’s warranty, so just be aware of that. I’m also fairly certain that they knew that when they sent me the drain. See, I’m rarely a risk for manufacturers. It’s almost to the point where I lose my warranty when I open the box. That’s just how I roll…

When you do open the box you’ll notice the drain only has two pieces. That’s it! It’s difficult for even me to screw this up. Yours actually may have more than that. The drain now has adjustable feet on the grate which was not available on the one I had. So in the photos of my tile-in grate you’ll see little tab-like things sticking out from the bottom – those are the feet. Yours will have adjustable feet to enable you to move it up or down to meet the height of your particular tile.

But it has two basic parts. It has the flange – that’s the part that sits in your mud deck and has the outlet for your drain pipe. And it has the grate – that’s the part that goes in the top, currently either brushed stainless steel or the tile-in option.

With any of the photos below you can click on the picture to view the large version. The huge group of photos at the bottom do the same thing, you can also click the little arrow to view each one in order after enlarging it – you don’t need to click on each individual photo at the bottom of the page.

Here is the floor on which I’m installing the drain. The shower is a small one – 3′ x 3′, the shower door will be installed directly over the drain. The drain will be at the entrance to the shower.

You’ll notice the old drain pipe in the center (the white part sticking up). Behind that, on top of the floor is the flange portion of the drain, and laying across the front of the shower is the grate portion. See the four tabs in the front? Those will be where your adjustable feet are. Laticrete knows enough to send me products with no moving parts. Yours, however, will have moving parts.

The first thing I did was to lay out where the drain will be installed, mark the center of the outlet (where it hooks into the drain pipe), and drill a hole in that spot.

You can see it if you’re so inclined – just click on the pic.

I did not take photos of drilling the hole in the floor because, well, it’s drilling a hole in plywood.

Not particularly spectacular.

However, after I did that I placed the drain into the hole to ensure that it was exactly where I wanted it. It was.

If you click on that picture and take a look at each end of the drain flange you’ll see why I had to *ahem* ‘customize’ this particular drain. The drain flange fits in the bathroom – fits precisely – from one sill plate (the 2×4 at the bottom of the wall) to the other (in this case the bottom brace for the sliding door). That’s great! If you don’t want the drain grate to be removable.

You do, however, want the drain grate to be removable. Once I installed the wall substrate the grate would not fit. So my ‘modification’ consisted of simply shortening the drain grate so it would fit between the two walls once the substrate, waterproofing and tile were installed. This is NOT recommended. Just so you know…

After that you need to hook the drain up to your drain pipe. In most installations your existing drain pipe will need to be moved! This post does not describe that – I’m not a plumber. My plumber is on speed dial. Once your drain pipe (and p-trap, etc.) are moved to where you need it – THEN you hook the drain up to the drain pipe.

This is done with what is called a no-hub connector. It is basically a rubber sleeve with clamps which fits the two pieces together. You place half of the sleeve onto your drain pipe and the other half onto the outlet of the drain and clamp it down.

If you do not have access beneath the drain once it is in place to tighten the clamps you can cut a short length of pvc or cpe and attach it to the bottom of the drain with the connector. You’ll then have the drain with the outlet, on that is the connector and a short length of pipe. Then when you go to install your drain you simply put the adhesive on that short length of pipe and the end of the p-trap (or a stub-up piece of pipe with a coupling) and press it in there to install the drain.

The photo to the right is of a different brand of drain, but it shows the coupling with a short length of pipe exactly like it would be on the Laticrete drain. You can see the rubber coupling and the metal clamp which is placed around it and tightened down. I had access below the floor in this particular shower so I didn’t need to do that here.

Once you get the drain in the proper place it’s time to form your mortar bed. This is the sloped mud deck for your tile floor. These drains are used with a liquid topical membrane called HydroBan. It is an elastomeric liquid which is brushed, rolled or troweled onto your substrate to make it waterproof. Tile is then installed directly to the membrane.

In this particular shower I have a bonded mortar bed. That simply means that the mud bed is attached to the plywood floor beneath it. I installed the wall substrate, in this case Densshield, and cut it to fit over and into the ends of the drain flange. If you click on that photo there you can see how the substrate is cut into the drain flange at the ends.

After the mud deck cures I’ll be installing the HydroBan and tile. That, however, will need to wait for the next post. It’s late and I’m almost out of beer. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. You can see all the photos of the process below, though, if you’re impatient.

There are quite a few benefits of using a linear drain. Rather than having a shallow bowl-shaped shower floor on which you must use smaller tile which will conform to the slope, you can use as large a tile as you want. The linear drains allow you to have a flat shower floor. It will be sloped in one direction from one end to the other, but it will be flat so you can use larger tile.

With the tile-in option the drain will also nearly disappear. You can continue any pattern from your bathroom floor right into the shower floor. It all ties in together really well.

These drains are normally installed up against one of the walls in the shower. It really doesn’t matter which you choose. However (!), there are a couple of rules (aren’t there always?).

If you want it against one of the side walls, rather than at the front or back of the shower, you need to have a curb for your shower. You can not have a curbless shower if the linear drain is on one of the side walls, the mud deck will be thicker at the opposite side.

If you want a curbless shower, such as this one, you either:

• Need the drain at the front of the shower, in which case the floor will slope from the drain up to the back wall. Or
• Need the floor to slope DOWN from your bathroom floor into the shower to the drain at the back wall.

If you do not have the structural ability to lower your floor in the shower and slope the deck down into the shower you need to have a curb at the front, then create your mud deck to slope from the drain against the back wall up to the curb at the front of the shower.

After your mud deck cures we need to install the HydroBan and seal everything up. I’ll cover all that in the next post. Until then you can partake in my horrible photography skills below covering the entire installation.

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