My Kingdom for a Shower

Happy Easter everyone! What did we decide to do this weekend? Since I had a half day of work on Friday, we decided to tear out the rest of the tile in the shower area and install our insert since it is at least a 3 day project and we have only one shower. We did purchase a mirror and new lights to go over the sink and actually did paint an accent wall, but I'll write about that in my next post.

 Day 1: (start around 1 pm)
Pull out the tile. More like take a huge mallet and repeatedly take out our frustrations on the wall. Why? If you are one of those lucky ones that purchased an older house, they didn't have the light stuff we call drywall or wonderboard.

 If you remove the tile, you'll notice a cement wall which when you start knocking it out, is 3/4 of an inch, which doesn't seem like that much, but add into that the mesh backing holding it in place against the wall. That pretty much took the rest of the afternoon to remove.
What we couldn't fit in our toter for pickup this week is sitting in boxes in our kitchen and will have to be disposed of over the next few weeks. Joy.

Day 2: Joshua is at work in the morning.
I finish straightening out the edges, pulling out nails and the rest of the mesh that didn't want to come out to get a smooth surface. Clean out debris in tub and on floor.
After hubby gets home, we go get wonderboard which is a nonorganic backer board that does not grow bacteria or mold. Another plus is that it is super light and easy to transport in the back of a pickup truck =)
The first thing we do is put up a plastic vapor layer, which is attached to the wood beams with a staple gun.

The rest of the day is spent measuring and cutting this stuff, which is not fun. As soon as you cut it with a box cutter, the material inside just spills all over the place. It looks like a mix of sand and little Styrofoam balls. I am so glad I decided to clean the living room the day prior.
Last task of the day is putting up the Wonderboard. Thank goodness!

Day 3: Easter
Get up early and head out to Lowes to pick up some caulk and look for adhesive tiles for a back-splash above the liner. They only had two which were awful, and ended up going to not one but two home depots because we were told they had them, which they did not. Luckily for us, one of their associates gave us a demo on how to put up the tile, showed us the materials to use, which was awesome-sauce. This guy definitely deserves a raise.
The first thing we do is apply this stuff called red guard. It is quite expensive (50 bucks a gallon), but it creates another vapor layer which if you are going to do things right, you want to make sure you use this stuff in areas that are going to have a lot of moisture. It looks like melted pink peeps, and is pretty much the same consistency but smells like that store bought boxed hair dye. Make sure you open up the windows when you are applying it.

We were told that it needs about 20 minutes to dry, but it is still a little cold out today so we let it set for about an hour before doing anything else. It goes on pink and turns red when it's dry.
Next step is to place the pieces of the liner and outline them exactly where we want them to be. We used a level to make sure the liner was level to the tub.
We attempted and failed at using this special adhesive for the tub liner. It was way to thick to work with and was a pain. We ended up using the liquid nails tub adhesive which was easy to work with and were able to get the rest of the liners up in minutes ( this was after wasting a large amount of time with the other stuff).
After each panel was carefully applied to the Wonderboard, we used duck tape to hold the panels in place as per manufacturer instructions. This will need to dry for a period of 24 hours.

There is not enough time to apply the tile this weekend and take a shower, so we are gonna opt with stopping at the point.  Next house we get is going to have 2 bathrooms so that this does not happen again. That's all I'm sayin! So the lesson for the day:
Use this:

NOT THIS!