WHY You Should Tile Your Floors FIRST! Waterproofing & Tiling a Shower Floor Step by Step

hey gang it's paul with start pack welcome back to our channel jordan and i are continuing with our a to z step-by-step shower build in our previous two videos the very first one we did in the shower we put our triton backer board on the walls and waterproofed it with schluter kerdi membrane in our last video we did our pre-slope and we used the technique where we used this strip of foam as a screed to get our pre-slope perfect from the perimeter all the way down to our drain it's dried rock hard it looks great but it's not waterproof so in today's video we're going to show you how to waterproof that and we're actually going to start laying some tile now let's talk waterproofing this shower floor so it's going to last a hundred years this is a pretty small shower about three by three feet and i can reach every part of it just by kneeling outside the curve but what if you had a much larger shower you're gonna have to tackle this in a couple of different steps your first step would be to waterproof all the edges you're going to get the sluter band material right here this is what it looks like it's a little thinner than the kerdi and you would put it in the edges and all of these products are sized so that you always get a two inch overlap on your seams like that you wouldn't want to do that two inches is much better for your overlap for your waterproofing but since this is such a small shower i really don't feel like i need the band and i can save four seams basically right so we're gonna make our base and our material coming up the walls all out of one piece of kerdi just like that we notched the corners now you can see how it's gonna work we're gonna install this first put our corner there and we're ready to go you could also do it this way you put your corner first put that on top it doesn't matter but i heard our timer go off on our thin set it's done slaking for 10 minutes let's head outside give it a little remix for three minutes bring all our materials back in here start putting down some waterproofing all right gang there it is schluter all set thin set this is the white color on all of this we use the gray because it's a little bit cheaper and sometimes you can get it a little more readily now switch to white because i only need half a bag for this floor for the waterproofing system i'm going to use the rest of that bag to set our floor tile because they're white also white floor tiles white thinset white grout no problem but now we're ready to start waterproofing this and we're gonna start with our four inside corners and again all we need is an eight by eight square notch trowel and you saw me before using a six inch drywall blade to make it perfectly smooth and to push all the air out so let's get these corners installed first and then we're gonna put in our main piece [Music] all right we're about ready to install this corner it's sitting right here but because we lowered our curve as you can see we got this little flap at the top we're just going to snip it off with our scissors about a quarter of an inch [Music] [Music] all of our inside corners are set and we're ready to put in our main piece but we're not done with corners yet we're going to use these outside corners over here and again we're still going to have to trim these because now they're too tall also so let's get our trowel put thinset here and put down our main piece we're almost done [Music] [Music] that's how it's going to look when you're ready to install your kerdi membrane and on the drain you don't need to come down here in this lower recess just stop at that upper bevel because that's where you're going to cut the hole in the membrane so your water can drain so i'm ready to go i've got an arrow marked on this piece pointing towards that valve so it's oriented right let me lay it in there and install the floor nice all right that literally took like three minutes now we're almost waterproof and you saw my technique with the knife i was setting that corner like that instead of jamming it in this way i felt like that was too much i've got a nice rounded corner there it's not pushing the schluter into the corners all right now let's talk outside corners all right on these outside corners schluter makes one of these again we're going to trim it put it there there flip it put it there and on this outside corner we're actually going to use one of our inside corners like that flip it also and it's going to cap that now you see we've got a little gap here a little piece of kerdi and a water seal all of that now over here we're just going to put one corner the glass is going to be here so that's going to go like that and extend way out here imagine the glasses in my left hand there's no point in waterproofing this i'm not going to use a corner there and the same thing goes over here this corner is going to extend way out past the glass but on this corner we decided to do the whole thing because this is our shower opening and water could come out and we wanted to seal this whole edge right here so let me move all this and start installing some outside corners [Music] all right all our corners are finished and technically we could start tiling immediately we don't have to wait for this all set to get hard under our membrane before we start putting tile on top of the membrane however in true stud pack fashion we're going the extra mile we're actually going to water test this when we lived on the west coast it was actually part of the permitting and inspection process you could not start tiling until the inspector signed you off on your water test i guess in california it's because they're trying to conserve every drop of water right but we like to water test it just to ensure that our work is perfect and we're not gonna have a leak in this pan and it'll last for years so we gotta let this all set dry we'll come back tomorrow fill it with water to the top of the curb that'll be our benchmark right come back the next day and see if any of it's leaked out but today's president's day i say we get out of here go home and grill some burgers dude let's do it all right [Music] [Laughter] all right can you go to sleep now yes all right it's the next day and now you can really tell the difference between the gray thinset and the white thinset it is totally dry and it is time to fill this with water we've got the hose coming through the window let's fill her up [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right cool we are at the top of our curve that's going to be our benchmark if you don't have a curb as your benchmark just put a mark on the wall we're gonna put our money where our mouth is now our water is where our work is we have a lot to do today so we're gonna let this sit for 24 hours and we're going to come back tomorrow see if we got any leaks all right we're back it's the next day and it really is the next day i didn't just change shirts for you but we would never do that anyway right jordan right all right now you will notice that the thinset is wet above the water line and that's fine because it's going to soak up that water but once we remove the water it's going to dry every shower in america you could separate into one of two categories it's going to be a draining type of system or it's going to be a drying type of system in the draining type of system water is going to get through any cracks it's going to get through the grout it's going to hit the waterproofing behind the mortar bed on the tile walls flow down hit the vinyl pan the lead pan the hot mop whatever it is flow to the drain and get out of the system through the weep holes that's where your bulk water goes on a drying type of shower you don't have bulk water it dries the same way it migrated in behind the tile right mainly through the grout but all this talk about water i want to get rid of this water so let's cut our membrane and see how we did now you'll notice we use the membrane to plug our drain if you have this inspected and your inspector will allow you to do that that's a good tip it saves you from getting a pipe plug and plugging it like that i'm just going to cut it out i got a hook blade in my utility knife i'm going to cut a small hole in the middle get all the water out and then i'll finish it off once i can see the drain you ready bud let's do it all right i'm a little bit nervous dude i've never tried this before all right there we go ready or not and we're off all right and if we did our job right there should be no standing water anywhere and it's looking great i'm gonna get the same hook blade and i'm gonna go all the way back to that bevel in the drain that we showed you a little bit earlier and then i should just be able to follow it around just like a compass huh there we go look at that [Music] now you will notice we have a horizontal discharge on our kerdi-drain most of them go straight down but this horizontal discharge enabled us to come across and 90 down to the existing trap without having to break up concrete and move the trap so my local supplier actually had one of those in stock but if they didn't i would order that and wait that's how much time it saved for us right jordan we have to jackhammer all that slab because remember we got a footing here and here this is a corner of a building we've been through this before and we know how much concrete is under there anything we can do to minimize that i'm going to do it all right our next step is to start tiling and we're going to tile the floor first i know a lot of you are instantly throwing your hands up and saying oh man what what are they talking about but this is the proverbial fork in the road right do you do the floors first or the walls first do you hang the upper cabinets first or the lower cabinets first do you use legos or do you use wire nuts now i know you pros all you guys and gals who do this every day you're going to set the tile on the walls first you're going to work your way out of the shower and do the floor and you come back the next day and grout everything so this is geared more towards the diyer those guys and gals who are doing it on the weekend and trying to do it themselves so we believe it's easier and you get a better finished product when you set the floor towel first and here's why now here's a piece of our floor tile and here's a piece of our wall tile now if we were to set the wall tile first and then put the floor tile against it we're going to end up with something like this and we're going to fill these in with either small pieces of stone or pieces of cut stone and if you're using a geometric shape like squares mosaics hexagonals penny tile you're going to end up cutting small slivers of that tile to try to fill in or you're going to fill it with grout and it's not going to look the greatest if you go back to my mom's shower video where we gave you some close-ups of the floor that's exactly what happened they weren't able to cut those little slivers so it's filled with gray grout on a white floor and to me it really stands out so we think it looks much better to do the floor first and put that on top doesn't that look killer it looks like it's smooth and uninterrupted right all right guys before we start laying tile we got to start with the drain so we're using all schluter products we've got the schluter drain of course comes in three parts the grate this comes in all different colors to match the shower trim we're going 1980s chrome now this is called the height adjustment collar and this is called the lateral adjustment ring let me show you how they all go together so let's start with the height adjustment collar it has these tabs molded on one side by comparison this other side is smooth it doesn't have them those tabs lock into this groove on your grate check it out you heard that snap that is not coming off without a putty knife now the lateral adjustment ring it could go on either way but it actually has this bevel on one side which makes it a little easier to start just like that now we've got it assembled come on down here and let me show you how this works so the lateral adjustment ring this part it allows you a little side to side adjustment isn't that cool to get your layout perfect and then the height adjustment collar allows you to go up and down with your grate depending on your tile thickness so they really thought of everything with this drain design now jordan i have decided to take a full sheet we're going to remove some of the stones from the middle and place it over the drain and work out from there to the walls just like we talked about earlier in the video so let's remove these pebbles from the middle get started oh [Music] unless you like it this side [Music] all right there we go gang as you can see we moved the stones from the middle got it set in there and here's all our extra stones now the idea is that we're going to use these and we're going to fill in here just like a puzzle piece something like that obviously we'll do a little better job because we're going to have a big pile of stones by the time we're done so i say we go get our other sheets of tile let's loose-fit everything make sure it works before we start making thinset all right that looks fantastic that's nine sheets jordan i've been messing around with it for a while and what we found was you have to rotate these and find that perfect corner right that perfect edge so they mesh well with the next one they're all pretty close but sometimes you find one that's just like perfect and that was our goal so we just removed full stones from the perimeter like of this sheet you can see the mesh right there there was a few stones over there hitting our wall so we just removed them same here and on these two and check it out here's three of those stones we talked about and see how nicely that's going to work as we fill it in and then when our wall tile goes on look how nice that's going to look and we haven't cut a single tile so it's almost time for thinset so i say we go outside mix it and while it's sleeking we'll come back inside and mark all these so we don't lose our pattern and we'll completely cover the drain with blue tape so we don't get thin set inside of there that's an important step let's head outside all right there's our thin set we mixed up only a quarter bag so we're not wasting it and we spared you the mixing montage you've seen enough of that right now i've got a margin trowel always good to have and i have two notch trowels i have this smaller one 11 64 square it's simply a dietrich trial by schluter and i have a quarter inch notched trowel what i'm going to do i'm going to put some thinset down embed our tile pull it up and i'm going to check for coverage if i don't like it and i need more thinset i'm going to move up one notch trowel size so let's put some thinset down and check out our coverage let's try it not bad but i think i'm going to move up one trial size for sure all right let's clean that up and the quarter inch is going to be the one we use all right let's go ahead and set our drain first and i'm going to start working on our floor tile we've got the s marked on there with a line that indicates that our schluter name is going to be properly oriented towards the door right we don't want it facing this way it's got to be right that's the stud pack way all i'm going to do let me get some thinset and i'm going to fill in under these corners so when we push it down and you're going to see that later this will ooze out and properly support this drain now we'll put our lateral adjustment ring on there come on just like that now i'm going to put some thinset around here that way it'll bond it to our drain [Music] all right gonna leave this high i'm gonna push it down once we get our tile in there so it's just below the level of the tile let's put our thinset all along here with our quarter inch notch trowel [Music] all right before we start laying tile i'm going to take my margin trowel and check out the perimeter here got quite a bit of thinset it's going to ooze up i know that so instead of cleaning it i'm going to remove it take the margin trowel like that and just scrape the sides see what a nice job that does i'm going to go all the way around [Music] all right finally ready to start laying some tile [Music] [Music] all right that is looking absolutely fantastic jordan i love the way that looks now the last step for us is to fill in all these areas around the perimeter and the drain with these loose stones if none of these are the perfect shape we have a couple of full sheets we can pull from and it goes something like this all right all the stones are set and done that looked great now i'm going to use my old grout float and i'm just going to tamp down the tops just to make sure they're all in plain so to speak once i'm done with that a light sponge and we are ready for grout tomorrow now in full disclosure we had a few that were hard to fit so we were able to cut little pieces with these tile nippers what do we have jordan maybe six of those yeah yeah not bad at all and when the wall tile is on there you won't ever see the cut edge the cut edge is always under the wall tile all right man let's clean this up get out of here all righty gang it is the next day and we are going to grout the shower floor today why are we grouting the floor before the wall tiles are even up we're going to talk about that when we head back into the bathroom but we are using prism grout and the color is arctic white or is it arctic arctic arctic antarctica it's arctic arc arc see this right here rapid setting they don't put that on there for no reason that is no joke i'm gonna spin the box around and we're gonna talk about that we did a shower over a year ago we used this grout and it started setting up within minutes we could barely finish the shower we saved it but it was a ton of work i still have some trauma from that project now check this out right here see how he's mixing it they're mixing it by hand for five minutes we used our drill for five minutes because that's how we mix all of our thin sets and grouts and all that stuff but we realized that introduces a lot of friction with friction comes heat heat is bad when you're mixing grout you want everything cool we're in the shade even though it's february here we're in short sleeves and shorts in southern louisiana it's kind of warm so i've got my cool water and my cool grout and we're gonna dump it in here and we're actually gonna use the drill but we're not gonna mix it for five minutes we're just gonna mix it until it's the consistency that we like and then we're going to let it slake all right buddy you ready to mix this grout let's do it let's do it all right i'm liking that a lot and that was only about 20 seconds and this thing is set at 300 rpm pretty slow but it did the job so we're gonna let it slake for five minutes and while it's doing that let's go back over here and let's talk about something very critical in this 17 pound box of grout there are actually two separate bags that total 17 pounds on the directions it says to add two quarts of water but that's if you're using both bags and on the bag let's see jordan right here mix one quart of water per each bag and that's exactly what we did i brought my little beaker today got exactly one quart four cups and we mixed our thin set all right man let's go inside let's talk about something else while that's leaking now i got in here this morning with the utility knife and this is a very important step and this goes back to selecting the right trowel size if you pick a trowel that is too big the notches are too big you're going to get a lot of thinset squeezing up between all the tiles and it's going to interfere with your grout job so we used that quarter inch trowel and it was perfect but we did have a few areas where the thinset squeezed up so i just got my knife and i cleaned all those areas out it's always pretty bad around the drain and i vacuumed the whole thing so all those loose bits are not going to get in my grout and you're probably asking yourself why are we grounding the floors already i mentioned it outside but come on down here and let's check it out around the perimeter we have some pretty large gaps but that's okay because remember our wall tile is going to come down and cover those but if i were to lay the wall tile first and then grout everything i can't be 100 sure that grout is going to get in here and fill all of those and the last thing i want is for a pocket to be in there that gets filled with water and now it's sitting in there and it can't really dry out and we know we're going to get some comments about working over a finished floor but we do that all the time and look gang it's a rock basically right we're not going to damage that we're going to cover it like i said and it's going to be fine but i heard our timer go off let's head outside our grout is finished flaking we're going to give it a little bit of a mix come back in here start grouting here we go i got my nice silicone grout float by primo tools let's get going i think i'm going to start in this corner back here and this should go pretty quick it's a small shower [Music] a lot of people [Music] all right gang it's all grouted but we got to wait for this grout to harden a little bit so we're going to take a little break and we'll come back and start sponging when this stuff gets hard all right we've been keeping an eye on this it is firm to the touch what i mean by that when i press down with my fingertip it barely goes in so i've got a dry sponge what do i mean by that there's just a couple of drops coming off of there and this is the most satisfying part for jordan and i let's start removing this grout and seeing what our finished product is going to look like nice it's perfect [Music] city [Music] all right gang there you go that's giving you a glimpse of what this is going to look like when it's all done yes there's a little bit of a haze here but i'm going to leave it alone we're going to come back tomorrow with this blue microfiber towel and give it a polish and it's going to remove all that haze you try to remove it with a sponge you're going to over water that grout and it's going to weaken the grout so i'm going to stop i made a promise to jordan i'm not going to come back and work on it after he leaves i got a set of security cameras in here that's right so we waterproof the floor we water tested it make sure denley lay the tile all into one video and we sure hope you learned something and we gave you the confidence to do this on your own if you got a bathroom you're trying to remodel let us know in the comments what you learned tell us about your projects check your like button if you think it's leaking you know how to waterproof it make sure you unplug it first smash it for us subscribe if you haven't already and we will see you guys on our next video [Music]

Channel: Stud Pack

Views: 1,011,207

Keywords: stud pack, studpack, how to tile a shower, how to tile a bathtub, how to tile a bathroom, tiling a shower, waterproofing a shower, how to waterproof a shower, tiling shower floor, tiling shower wall, shower tile installation, shower waterproofing system, schluter, kerdi, ditra, thinset, allset, shower curb, thinset trowel, tile trowel, pebble tile, how to grout tile, grouting a shower

Id: F_-YWi2yKl4

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 27 2022