Shower Installation Design Tips

There are several key points to consider when designing and building your shower. When opting for a frameless, semi-frameless or fully-framed enclosure, it is important to keep these tips in mind. Through the years our company has worked with many vendors and developed techniques for taking on different characteristics our technicians come across to ensure a secure and aesthetically pleasing custom shower enclosure.

Please keep these 5 key tips in mind when designing, planning and building your enclosure:

 

  1. The threshold, whether it is made of marble, tile, etc. should be slightly pitched into the shower enclosure. See the image below to get a better understanding. This is something that is overlooked more often than you realize. This ensures that the water will run down the glass and back into the shower, instead of out. We also recommend that the threshold is made up of a flat surface, like marble instead of segmented tiles. This is also easy to keep clean down the road.413b8527727c61231fa5904016a250fa
  2. Ensure there is proper blocking at the vertical walls where the shower will be installed behind the tile. It is especially important to have extra blocking on the door hinge side wall for added support of the glass. This allows for much more support of the glass, especially from the constant swinging of the door.frontView
  3. Typically, a shower enclosure is installed so that it sits centered on the threshold (base) of the opening. Many people prefer when the grout line from the tile that is on the walls lines up with the center of the threshold. Whether it is a frameless or framed unit, it is preferred the shower sits in the center.shower-door-2il
  4. Different kinds of tile is easier than others to drill through. That being said, the type of tile will effect the amount of labor required to install a custom shower enclosure. Porcelain is the most difficult to drill through. However, that being said, we will not install a shower of any kind into glass tile. The way to work around this is to have a strip of marble or tile in the location the door with sit for proper installation. More often than not, the glass tiles break with drilling. If there is an accent strip made of glass tile in the shower, we will avoid placing a hing or clamp through the ribbon. natural-white-brick-polished-3x6
  5. If your shower enclosure has a kneewall, it is a must that the cap piece of marble lays flush with the tiled wall that runs to the base. This is so the glass door can line up with the panel that sits on the kneewall and can close as close together as possible to eliminate water splashing out. Note the diagram below.frameless-shower-design-tips