Today we bring you our Week 7 of the One Room Challenge where we poured our mortar bed for our shower, finished waterproofing, and started tiling our bathroom. That is what I wish I could say but in reality, we did none of those things. We barely finished closing everything up after completing our rough-in plumbing last week and mirror niches.
To see what we did in past weeks follow any of these links!
Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4– Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8
Mortar Bed
Ideally, we were supposed to pour the mortar bed early this week. But there were some necessary steps that although not required were needed to have a perfect finish.
- We cut off 1 1/2 inch of our floor joist. Added a sister joist (2 on each side that was cut) for more support to be able to bring down our subfloor and create our recessed shower floor. Check!
- Created a 3/8 of an inch per foot pitch going one foot out of the shower towards the shower. Check!
- Made cutouts for the drain flange in the shower area and ended up spending a little bit of time here. All because the flange body was hitting the vent pipe. So we had to relocate the drain trap 1 1/2 inch away from the vent pipe in order for the drain body to have proper clearance from the vent pipe. Check!
- We glued and drilled the subfloor in place and closed any gaps made by the recessed floor with scraps and glued those suckers as well. We used subfloor adhesive and 3 1/2 inch screws. Check!
- We had to make 1/4 inch notch on all studs surrounding the shower “stall”. Why? you ask. Well, this is so that we can raise and attach the shower bladder and not have any deformation or pinching of the bladder when we install the cement board. Here is where we got held up this week and one of the reasons we couldn’t pour the mortar bed.
The notched studs! 
Close up of the pitch. 
New Subfloor!
Waterproofing
Obviously, we need to install first the bladder for the shower and then we can waterproof it. If you are like me and are completely new to this, you must be asking why not just waterproof first and then you do the bladder? Well, that’s not how it works.
The bladder is a fail-proof system for the shower. Meaning that if all hell breaks loose this liner, which is essentially a piece of “rubber”, will prevent any water seeping through the tile, thinset, and mortar bed and damaging your subfloor. Although either way we are going to use a bit of thinset to pre-pitch the bladder towards the drain.
That being said the bladder is located in the shower area. In our case, it extends about 1 ft outside of the recessed floor. It goes up 7 inches over the studs and then the cement board goes over it but not embedded in the mortar bed. There is a 1/4 – 1/2 inch gap between the mortar bed and the cement board.
After all the cement boards are up and the joints are made we are going to go the extra step and are going to apply a waterproofing membrane. You will hear that some people find that the cement board is enough for waterproofing. But since our bathroom is going to be geared mostly towards a wet room we decided to go big or go home, in waterproofing.
So as you can see bladder goes in first. So waterproofing has to wait until we are able to put that rubber in ;).
Tiling
Ah! Soñar no cuesta nada! It means Dreaming doesn’t cost a thing! A very accurate saying for our situation. I wish we could have been able to start tiling but all we got left is to pray that we are able to tile sometime this upcoming week.
As I said this week on one of the IG stories updates of our one-room challenge space, this is not a competition, we see it more as a celebration of the creativity of many different people, a chance to connect and be inspired by others. It’s a matter of enjoying the journey and learning new things, and a few tricks along the way. So we may or may not finish in time for the 8 weeks, all I know is that we are going to keep at it, give it our all, maybe pull some all-nighters, do some day drinking, pray to God and enjoy our process and all the others participating in this one room challenge!
How about you, do you think you will be able to finish in time for the reveal week? Let us know in the comments below. Now let’s go see how the other spaces are coming along this week!
