Building Shower Pans -- The Traditional Manner

Building a shower pan the traditional way takes skill but not much money. It's mostly mortar work and most do it yourselfers don't do showers. Especially since now there are several options for building showers without mortar.

Even though mortar shower construction is an old method, there are still several reasons it's popular. One reason is cost. It's often much less expensive to get a tile shower built with a mortar shower pan. Especially if the shower is a custom size. That's no problem at all for mortar construction.

Here are several key components to the typical mortar pan...

Shower floors are built up in layers. It's bottom up, a layer at a time. This is simplified, but there are four main parts to a tile shower floor.

The base of the floor is a layer of mortar, also called deck mud. The mortar is made of sand, portland cement and water. Not much water is used, to reduce shrinking as the mix dries. The mortar is put in place and then sloped to establish the shape of the floor.

The mortar is sloped to a special tile shower drain. What's special? Well, the drain has holes on two levels. One level is the one you see in the floor. The other level is actually built into the floor. That lower level is the one the first mortar layer slopes to.

Over the first, or bottom, mortar layer is laid the actual shower liner membrane. It's a vinyl sheet that's then glued to the tile base and draped up the shower walls. That layer is really what makes the shower waterproof.

See, shower floors are not waterproof. That's because water goes right through grout and through some types of tile too. The liner puts a stop to that. The liner forms a waterproof pool and routes water down the slope right to the lower drain level. There are some tricks to how that happens, but that's the general idea.

Then right over the liner membrane, another mortar layer is installed to form the actual tile base. That layer is also made of deck mud and is sloped to the upper drain opening at about the same slope as the first layer.

Building a shower pan the traditional way still is a great method to build showers. It's a step by step process. Each step is fairly simple. But there are several tricks, plus critical parts of a shower are buried in the floor.
Get a free step-by-step explanation of shower pan installation on our tile website.



Al Bullington invites you to visit his site about installing tile for answers to your tile questions.