With the shrinking size of houses, the size of bathrooms has been severely affected. There isn’t enough space to accommodate all your conveniences. Designers and producers have always been quick to sense these requirements and offer varied products to add to convenience of householders.

One such development is for bathroom design by way of shower enclosures or shower stalls. These offer some very practical and better solutions to relieve you of some of the often faced problems connected with bathroom experiences. For one, it eliminates the splashing of water as is most often experienced if you have a rod and curtain arrangement. Apart from giving an untidy look, it is risky to have water all around the bathroom. The other significant contribution is that it adds to the décor of the bathroom.

As it’s an enclosed unit, it becomes all the more important to plan shower storage separate from the main storage provided for the bathroom. The enclosure is indeed a separate room and you certainly won’t find it very convenient walking to another part of the bathroom to fetch or replace some item while in the middle of having a shower. Moreover, the items that you need while showering aren’t too big or voluminous to occupy a large area.

Shower stalls are usually rather small, and thus demand careful planning of your storage. As you are dealing with very limited space, you would certainly like to ensure that other things don’t get sprayed with water. It will be ideal to use one of the corners for installing a corner shower shelf, with a corner shower caddy or a shower basket.

The options for a corner shower shelf are varied and many. You get a very large variety of designs of corner storage in the shower stall. You may simply opt for single wall shelf in marble or a high pole shower caddy that goes up to the ceiling. You may prefer to have a multi tier basket in brass duly finished in chrome or nickel. Perhaps you would prefer a single wire basket?

The size of storage that you might need depends upon the kind and number of items that you like to have in there. The larger the family, the more will be space required. Families with children would most certainly need more space. If you are a couple, a solo marble shelf would suffice. The tension pole corner caddies generally have sufficient room for accommodating most of the items needing storage next to the showerhead. It’s worthwhile having an assessment of your requirements before hand, lest you should realize that the arrangement you opted for is inadequate.

While building your house, you would like to ensure that everything in every room looks good, while being perfect and in its right place to facilitate day to day living yet continuing to look good. It’s quite usual for people to spend considerable time for deciding the layout and selecting the accessories for the bathroom, the most frequented room by all members of the family. Every householder wants to experience comfort while using the bathroom. One accessory that adds to the comfort there and is easily installed is a well designed frameless shower screen.

The elite segment of society especially likes to include frameless shower screen in the bathroom. The designers and manufacturers having sensed that need are busy making such screens for those wanting to add an element of luxury in their bathrooms.

Primarily, a shower screen is just a large piece of glass that separates the bathroom area from the rest of it, thus creating exclusive area for the purpose of shower. Surely, it adds to the looks of the bathroom by keeping it clean and dry most of the time. As water wouldn’t spill over the rest of the bathroom, such an arrangement facilitates cleaning up the area. The maintenance of such screen is very quick and easy, just wiping off the water stains every other day, if not everyday. All that one need is a shower cleanser and a piece of towel or cloth.

A frameless shower proves better than its framed counterpart in certain ways. It is durable and resilient and adds value to the property, if ever you decide to put it on sale. A framed screen has metal and makes it rather difficult to maintain the desired level of cleanliness.

A frameless screen while giving the bathroom a neat touch, adds to its overall style and elegance. Anybody interested in the subject of interior decoration would know of the helpful and decorative features that such screens provide. These are being patronized the entire world over. That’s because householders realize the practical benefit such screens offer, apart from their aesthetic value. They provide an easy and effective addition to the bathroom while maintaining your privacy and reducing the time required for cleaning and wiping of floors.

When you opt for frameless shower, you give your bathroom a minimalist look. Moreover, the lack of fittings and fixtures make its size appear larger, especially when viewed thru the glass. A framed glass, on the other hand, gives a closed kind of feeling making it quite inappropriate for smaller bathrooms.

Building a Custom Ceramic Tile Shower

Shower pan is the most important component of a ceramic tile shower stall. The shower pan directs water to the drain, thus preventing leakage from the shower. That makes it imperative to have proper and perfect installation of shower pan for it to remain waterproof and durable.

The shower pan is nothing but a mortar bed that comprises of a flexible shower pan liner squeezed between two layers of mortar. The walls of shower stall are prepared using 2×4 studding and covered with some kind of backer board underlayment on to which are fixed ceramic tiles.

The installation of a shower pan isn’t difficult. First you spread a layer of mortar. The mortar should be sloped properly to facilitate water to flow towards the drain. On top of this sloped bed of mortar the flexible plastic shower pan membrane member is installed.

Make sure to cut the shower pan membrane liner to size and hand mold it into the shower base. While cutting the pan, make it in such a way that the extra material around the pan suffices it to be secured with nails and studs. Another important tip is to complete the installation of shower pan before installing the backer board to the walls of the shower.

After you have ensured the membrane of shower pan is locked, the second layer of mortar needs to be applied, once again be careful to maintain the slope of the mortar towards the drain. After the shower pan mortar bed has settled down, you can go ahead with the fixing of the backer board to the walls and proceed with the installation of ceramic tiles.

Start the installation of tiles from around the middle of the shower pan, gradually moving away from it. While going with the installation of ceramic tiles on the walls, a plumb line is used to run straight lines along the length of the walls. Keeping the plumb line at the ceiling and centered on a wall, draw the line. That enables you to have a vertical line going along the length of the wall.

Now you can fix your tiles away from the line towards the edges of the wall. Continue the same way for rest of the walls.

For cutting of tiles a wet saw is most suited, for it allows you to get very accurate cuts, thus minimizing wastage of ceramic tiles.

The ceramic tiles take about 24-48 hours to set up, and you can apply grout to tiles only after they have set in. And, at the end of it all, you naturally would prefer to apply a sealer to prevent moisture from seeping thru the grout lines.