Castro District Bath, January 2026

This bathroom was in the same Castro District duplex as the marble herringbone entryway. The work covered the bathroom floor, a new shower pan and surround, and the shower’s glass door.

The bathroom floor is a medium-format tile. It’s big enough to keep grout lines to a minimum and make the room feel open, and small enough to follow a floor that isn’t perfectly flat, which in an older San Francisco building it rarely is.

The shower pan is built the traditional way. Over the pre-slope went a PVC waterproofing liner, which carries any water that gets through the tile and grout down to the clamping-ring drain. On top of the liner, I packed a sloped deck-mud bed to give the tile a solid, properly pitched base so water runs to the drain and doesn’t pool. It’s more labor than a foam or pre-formed pan, but a well-built mud bed over a liner is about as durable as a shower floor gets.

The shower floor is mosaic tile. Small tiles are the right choice for a sloped pan, because they follow the pitch toward the drain and the extra grout lines add grip underfoot. The walls of the surround are field tile in a grid pattern, a clean, classic layout that works well with the mosaic floor below.

Heavy glass doors need solid anchoring, so before tiling I installed studs over the shower curb to give the door hardware something substantial to mount to. Hinges and clips screwed into backer or tile alone can loosen over time under the weight of the glass. Planning the framing for the door before the tile goes up is one of those steps that’s invisible once the job is done, and essential.

I finished by installing the glass door. I’m pretty happy with the results. The shower is solidly built from the pan up, and it has a clean, finished look that fits the rest of the house.