2024 El Sobrante Shower Backer And Surround

This small stand-up shower in El Sobrante looked like a simple job. It was more challenging than it looked.

A home in transition

The family had been through a tragedy involving a child, and it was time to move on. The owner was remodeling the whole house ahead of a sale and co-managing much of the work himself, so he was closely involved in every step. Understandably, the entire house was a construction site, with life in flux and rooms full of what comes with packing up a home.

That made for a cluttered, crowded workspace, and it was hard to find room to work. A clean, well-lit, uncluttered workspace is part of how good work gets done quickly, and when that isn’t possible, everything takes longer: laying out tile, keeping cuts clean, keeping dust out of fresh grout. Sometimes, though, you work with what you’ve got. Families move for hard reasons, and meeting them where they are is part of the job.

The shower itself

The work followed the right order for a shower nook. First, a new shower pan was set, level and fully supported, and connected to the drain. A pan that isn’t level, or that flexes, will crack or pool water no matter how good the tile above it is. Then cement backer went up, brought down in front of the pan’s flange, so any water running down the wall is directed into the pan, never behind it. Over the backer went a waterproofing layer, and only then the tile.

Details that multiplied the work

The client chose a border tile that was a different thickness from the standard field tile. Tiles of different thicknesses can’t just be set side by side. The mortar bed has to be adjusted under one or the other so their faces line up, course after course.

The shower niche was edged in pencil tile, with mitered cuts at the corners. Mitering pencil tile is precise, slow work: each small, rounded piece has to be cut at an exact angle on the wet saw so the corners meet cleanly without a gap. Details like this take a lot of time and add little function, but when a client wants them, they have to be done right.

Several changes also came after the project was scoped and underway: a shelf, edging for the shelf, and a change of mortar. Each change meant rethinking work already planned.

Six days instead of two

A shower like this should take a day and a half to two days. This one took about six. That’s the real cost of mid-project changes, mismatched materials, and a crowded site. None of them shows in the finished tile, but all of them show up in the schedule. The shower got done right; it just took the long way there.

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