How to Slope a Shower Pan: Tile Coach Episode 18

alright hey thanks for checking out another one of my videos I'm Isaac Ostrom today I'm going to show you the correct way to float a shower pan I do have some other floating of shower pan videos but they're kind of old not real good quality and I wanted to do in my shop so that we could get a close-up of everything so once you come in here Johnny and we'll show you what I got so I have this right here isn't required but this is actually a drainage mat it's called Schluter trova and it allows

underneath the the mortar to drain better into the weep holes so I have other videos I'll put up the card of making waterproofing the vinyl pan liner but basically you see I've already got it waterproofed and this this drainage mat is gonna allow everything to work its way down to the Reaper okay so you see the weep holes right here this is for any water that gets under the tile to be able to drain down and get into the weep holes and also there's little channels under this collar here that allow any water to get

down into the drain and out so we need to be careful not to block any of these weep holes so that's why we use gravel about the height that want I like to have my deck floats at least an inch and a half and yeah we're gonna be put those all around the drain [Applause] and that's to protect those weep holes okay so it's gonna jump our deck but in again this is the deck mine I'll put up the card so you can see our deck mud it's a dry pack and I'm not gonna go

over it too much because I have other videos on it but yeah this is what we use so I'll put up the cards so you can learn more about how to use deck mud how it's made and all that stuff one of the first things I like to do is get my wheat protection kind of covered up so it doesn't get moved around when I'm floating so I'll just start by packing in my deck mud up to the drain here that's actually gonna help keep my my drink from moving around too much too now if

I was on a job I'd probably protect this drain with with tape put some blue tape or stucco tape on there but since I'm in a shop and I want you to be able to see the drain I'm gonna leave it and this is just a wood float so you can pick this up that's your home improvement store pile shop wherever I'm just kind of spreading the mud around so the slope we want to get is a quarter inch per foot so this is a two foot level my longest run is about two feet so

I'm gonna want a half inch of fall from this point to this point I also have to take into account that my tile this is the tile we're going to use is gonna be a little bit lower it's gonna sit right there so I want to get when I'm level with the bubble I want a half inch you HOT there the other thing I can do is take another scrap piece of tile to put here it kind of helps create a little spot discrete off of so we are half inch up still a little high

there we go so you can see the bubbles in the middle on my level and I have a half inch gap right there so that's the correct amount of slope so I know that this point now is what I want to make my whole perimeter I want to make the whole perimeter level with that spot so the way I do that so now you can see the bubble is in the middle but I'm a little high right about there so that sides level I'm gonna take my two foot level and do this side see I'm

right there level there bubbles in the middle now I'm just gonna continue it so that's what and as you can see when I pack my mud down it gives me an indentation because I'm gonna screech off with that line there I'm gonna come to this side and myself some more mud here and we are level gotten off because you should be level from here to here and there so I'm level now I have my perimeter all level so now all you got to do is fill in and screech so make sure you keep your would

float nice and nice and clean you don't want your mud to get built up on there you'll start dragging things around now I'm just gonna kind of eyeball where I need to be again if you're used to working with mortar like wet mortar this is so much easier using Dec mud if you can move it around and it doesn't slump so much easier to work with okay so now I have a little actually notched I've actually notched the tile so that are not just a stick around the tile so that I get the right height

that my drain so I'm going to take this stick and put it on the drain so that I guess I allow the room see I'm leaving enough room there for my tile and I'll do this other edge here and if you're a beginner you might want to put a little tile in each corner that way if you just know that you haven't dug too deep did you leave that tile there when you're using deck mud make sure you're packing it down you kind of get it where it's supposed to be in the packet into place

so now I'm gonna do this edge make sure packed is the drain do the same thing on this side okay we're good there so I have that and I'm actually going to trim this dick a little bit because it's too long now to meet the short sides it's about right so now I can kind of start moving my mud around my screen point is right here you can see careful not to go past that you want your tile on a shower pan to be level all the way around and then fall to the middle so

you're actually going to have a little more slope on the short ends than in the long ends I'm doing a lot of this kind of just by watching my stick drag across careful not to dig into my my screed that I'd set up so there there's there's one part of the pie so I'm just going to do this in sections I'm going to do do this section in that section and go where I'm around [Music] and the easiest way to keep your your perimeter screen so that it doesn't get messed up if you get mud

up against it like this just kind of peel it away like that gently and then that's revealed again yeah welcome it out I've done up every four sides of my pie I have now you can use either your wood float or I have a foam float that works really good for this it just tends not to dig in as much so I'm gonna go around and just give it another little tamp down the next thing I'm gonna do is kind of finish it you can see right now it's kind of rough looking but once I

take this this float I can use it in a circular motion and it really takes a lot of this stuff out we have this kind of working working everything and get it really nice and smooth dampen it down so the last thing I'm going to do just take my finishing trowel and then make it really really smooth pushing it down and so I'm using some force you're pushing it down it's doing a couple things it's packing into the surface to make it harder and it's also making it smoother and little things like this see this

little tiny thing you can fill out in within sets but I like my works to look really pretty so you can see how that works there and what did that take me about fifteen twenty minutes so yeah so hey thanks again for checking out my videos I hope you got something out of it and leave comments click like and subscribe rock on guys talk to you soon