Walk-in shower (tiled floor as opposed to shower tray)

[IShouldBeSoLurky]

We've had an offer accepted on a house that has a huge bathroom. Has potential to be really lovely once it's had some work done, and I'm thinking it would be nice to have a freestanding bath and large walk-in shower with the same tiles as on the rest of the floor. I've been reading this board for long enough to imagine the horrified reaction from PigletJohn and talk of how if the drain got blocked we'd have to demolish the entire house, or similar. But they look so pretty!

Has anyone done similar? Or is it a really stupid idea?

they do tend to leak.

There is supposed to be some kind of membrane now to line the floor before tiling. Bathroom specialists may know about it.

You will need (at least one) gully in the middle of the floor that you can clean from above, unlike ordinary waste traps that you have to unscrew from underneath. If you don't use the shower for a while, it will dry out and drain smells will come up. SARS was spread from these floor traps in IIRC a Hong Kong hotel.

When the drain gets blocked, water will flood the floor and run out under the door. Seen it. Buy a big wet-and-dry canister vac and keep it in the cleaner's cupboard outside the bathroom, with the big plunger and the yard-scraper.

glum

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539564/figure/fig2/ like this

told you

We had a wet room put into the granny flat. The floor needed a special underlay stuff, the fall of the flood had to allow drainage, the special underfloor stuff had to go up the wall so many inches and ordinary floor tiles are not suitable for the shower area so tbh if we were doing it again I would not bother it was expensive at mates rates. No blockages or floods yet but the bathroom leads onto a marble floor so we should be ok.
Cleaning well the glass surround makes it no easier then a normal shower but the lack of sliding door means no gungy rims either

I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SARS I JUST WANT MY BATHROOM IN LIVING ETC.

Thanks for the massively helpful advice. Am clueless - how exactly is a shower tray different, other than the potential need to untile if it all got blocked? Presumably the drains that there'd need to be under a normal shower tray would be the same as under a tiled shower base?

That should have been I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SARS I JUST WANT MY BATHROOM IN LIVING ETC.

Am about as good at posting as I am at bathrooms.

you can get shower trays on legs with a removable panel to access the trap. It is much simpler than digging the floor up. Even a solid tray is less work to break away from the wall and lift off.

People who don't want to take up their floors are a source of great annoyance to plumbers and electricians, and they often end up tolerating leaks and faults just to avoid it.

You can get quite large trays now, some of them have strange curvey glass walls round them.

I have noticed that disabled bathrooms with showers but no cubicle seem to have a curtain to go round the shower area. I don't know if this is mainly to reduce splash and cleaning, or to keep the cold draughts away. I suppose you would have to hose and mop the whole floor to clean up watermarks, soap and hairs.

My parents did this just before I left home for uni. They paid the village idiot builders to do it whilst they went on holiday. They came back to a lovely looking bathroom, they'd made the floor slightly sloped so all the water would run into a corner. They'd put the drain at the TOP of the slope

So if you do go down this route get really good builders! Also, even after it was fixed it was kind of annoying, damp tights of you wanted to nip back in to retrieve a forgotten hair tie...

We put one in our downstairs bathroom and love it. There's so much space... No knocking my elbows on the side of the cubicle when I'm washing my hair! Basically the shower area takes up half the bathroom. Floor is raised a couple of inches and has sloping bit under the actual shower head to direct water into the drain. After a shower we use a window cleaner thingy on a stick (like a rubber blade.... what the heck is it called??) to sweep the water in the direction of the drain. No glass panel so just the floor to clean. No flooding problems so far (3 or 4 years). I have a chair in there as I've had several foot surgeries - it's been fantastically easy to access even with leg in a cast (not the reason we put it in, just an added bonus).

Forgot to add, yes we did get the floor dug up which added to the cost, but we had the whole thing re-tiled anyway so not that much extra work. And sweeping the water up afterwards takes 15 seconds!

Lol at the drain at the top of the slope... Doh!

So many more helpful replies, thank you! We would definitely want screens - my DP showers in manner of an elephant at the watering hole. Can see the point about littler tiles leading to the drain.

I don't mind the idea of a shower tray, just think the bathroom layout would look nicer if the shower was open with glass screens surrounding it and the floor matched the floor elsewhere. But I don't want to be a bathroom dick and create expensive problems for future.

It's a first-floor bathroom if that makes a difference (so we wouldn't be able to sweep out the floodwater to irrigate our tomatoes).

We put one in a few weeks ago. It's upstairs so the floor was reinforced and the whole room tanked. It's awesome!
I asked on here if anyone had seen the bath in a wetroom idea, and was told it was ridiculous...but it's great.

It's only a small bathroom but feels huge. I can put up a photo if you like?

Yes, please, magicstar

Our bathroom is stupidly vast - about 3m x 3m. It suits us because having a big bathroom is just lovely, but I want to spend the money we're going to spend on it in a sensible way, rather than just having loads of floor space, so it makes sense to make it as lovely as we can.

Ours was 5' x 8', with a useless alcove in the bedroom, so we knocked through to make it 11' and fit a bath in.

We put a screen in but there's so much room in the shower now...the tray under the tiles is 1200mm x 1700mm.
It's only been finished a couple of weeks...here's a pic I took 5 minutes ago lol.

Oops pic didn't work. I'll try again.

You do have to get grippier tiles in the shower area by the way, otherwise you'd break your neck.

Another angle

I love your basin! Where's it from?

We got everything from our local builders providers. I've seen them in lots of places.

I really wanted the same in our bathroom. The builder did a lot of tooth sucking, muttering about joist height, tanking and increased cost.
In the end we went for one of these

www.roman-showers.com/roman/contracts/
Also, you can get very low level shower trays that can be tiled over which look amazing, but we discounted them due to the cost.

That's a gorgeous bathroom, I have serious envy

"There is supposed to be some kind of membrane now to line the floor before tiling. Bathroom specialists may know about it."

I believe the brand name is Wedi Board!