The Great Shower University

Series: The Shower Chronicles
Three acts of a bathroom remodel—and three different lessons about what happens when you start pulling on a thread.

[1. The Great Shower University] • [2. The Shower Was Never the Project] • [3. A Thousand Little Decisions]

Part 1 of 3: It started with a shower. Then I discovered YouTube.

Or How I Accidentally Earned a Master’s Degree in Tile.

The funny thing about getting older is that you finally reach a point in life where you can afford the things you always wanted, but by then there are approximately 14 million choices standing between you and actually getting them.

I’m sitting on the porch as I write this, staring at a stack of shower materials that looks suspiciously like the inventory list from a small construction company, wondering how a simple bathroom remodel turned into a four-credit college course.

Years ago, remodeling a bathroom wasn’t complicated. You picked a color. You picked a fixture. You wrote a check or swung a hammer and called it a day.

Today, buying a shower is like applying to graduate school.

The funny part is that most of us don’t even realize it happened.

Somewhere along the way, we went from having too few choices to having too many. We spent decades complaining about limited options, and now we’re standing in the tile aisle staring at 847 nearly identical shades of white, wondering if we should have become monks instead.

That’s how this whole thing started.

Our master bathroom in the new condo had one of those one-piece fiberglass shower units straight out of the 1990s. You know the type. Beige-ish. Functional in the same way a microwave dinner is functional.

Nobody has ever looked at one and said, “Now that’s beautiful.”

This one had seen better days.

Actually, I’m not sure it had ever seen better days.

The previous owner had apparently used one of those spongy shower mats on the floor. At some point, the mat and the shower floor had entered into a permanent relationship. Not a healthy relationship, either. More like a chemical bond.

I tried everything—scrubbing, cleaning products, light wet sanding, persuasion, and eventually threats.

Nothing worked.

The mat had essentially vulcanized itself to the shower floor like it was trying to become part of the original manufacturing process.

Even worse, there was a hole in one corner that somebody had “repaired” with a generous application of silicone caulk.

And when I say repaired, I mean they squeezed enough caulk into the hole to make it somebody else’s problem.

I knew exactly what happened. Some installer had dropped the corner of the heavy glass shower door during installation. The shape of the damage matched perfectly.

Case closed.

I took one look at it and made my decision.

Demolition Is Good for the Soul

Now we’re talking.

I grabbed my trusty reciprocating saw—or “Sawzall,” to those of us who treat Milwaukee’s trademarked brand name as a proper noun—installed a carbide demolition blade, and went to work.

There’s something deeply satisfying about cutting a giant fiberglass shower into pieces. Maybe it’s the noise. Maybe it’s the dust. Maybe it’s knowing that after years of neglect, its reign of terror is finally ending.

Within minutes, I had the thing sliced into half a dozen manageable chunks, loaded into the Subaru, and headed to the city dump.

Forty-five minutes from start to finish.

Easy peasy.

I had practice.

Years ago, I removed a gigantic six-person in-ground hot tub at our Florida house. Once you’ve dismantled one of those monsters, a fiberglass shower feels like a warm-up exercise.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself, which is usually when the universe decides to humble me.

The Floor Had Other Plans

With the shower gone, I finally got my first look behind the curtain.

Two problems immediately appeared.

The first was plumbing. The water lines had been run underneath the hollow shower base. Not ideal, but manageable.

The second problem was considerably more exciting.

It involved a floor joist and language that probably shouldn’t appear in a family blog.

The original plumbers had cut a notch into one of the floor joists for the drain line. Not a small notch. Not a reasonable notch.

About seventy percent of the joist.

Imagine cutting seventy percent through one leg of a kitchen chair and then wondering why it wobbles. That’s essentially what I found.

I wasn’t about to spend thousands of dollars and countless hours building a beautiful tiled shower on top of a compromised floor system, so down into the crawl space I went.

Several times, unfortunately.

Anyone who has never worked in a crawl space probably imagines it as a slightly cramped basement.

That’s adorable.

A crawl space is more like military training mixed with cave exploration. There’s no headroom, dust everywhere, fiberglass insulation hanging down like Spanish moss, and absolutely nothing within easy reach.

The plumbing repairs alone required two trips to Home Depot.

Of course they did.

I’ve never completed a project in my life without at least one emergency supply run. In fact, I suspect Home Depot executives have hidden cameras in my house and wait for me to start projects.

“He’s beginning the bathroom remodel, boys. Increase the quarterly revenue forecast.”

Welcome to Shower University

What happened next is what really fascinated me.

I thought I was building a shower.

What I was actually doing was earning a degree.

Every night, I’d sit down with YouTube and learn something new. Large-format tile. Lippage. Offset patterns. Thinset. Mortar coverage. Trowel-notch geometry. Waterproofing systems. Backer boards. Expansion joints. Shower pans.

It felt like the first week of college, when every professor assumes you already know the terminology and you’re afraid to raise your hand because everyone else seems to understand what they’re talking about.

Ten years ago, I didn’t know what thinset was.

Today I have opinions about it.

Strong opinions.

Possibly unhealthy opinions.

I learned there are different types of thinset depending on the tile. Different colors of thinset depending on the grout. Different trowel sizes depending on tile dimensions.

At one point, I spent twenty minutes watching a guy explain mortar ridge collapse.

Mortar ridge collapse.

If you’d told twenty-five-year-old me that someday I’d voluntarily watch that video, he’d have laughed himself unconscious.

Then came tile.

Porcelain versus ceramic. Glossy versus matte. Rectified edges. Glazing techniques. Tile sizes. Patterns. Running bonds. Offsets.

Every answer led to three more questions.

And then I stumbled into the marble world.

Apparently there are major marble families: Carrara, Calacatta, and Arabescato. They all look similar to the untrained eye.

Unfortunately, after several weeks of research, my eye was becoming trained.

Now I could see differences in veining patterns, color temperatures, and background shades.

At some point Jan held up two tile samples and asked which one I liked better.

I stared at them.

They appeared identical.

“That one has warmer undertones,” she said.

I nodded thoughtfully, as if I knew what that meant.

Three weeks earlier, I didn’t know what thinset was.

Now I was apparently evaluating undertones.

My father never had these problems. If Dad needed a shower, he bought the white one.

Decision made.

Meanwhile, I was comparing Italian marble families and researching grout colors like I was preparing testimony for Congress.

Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that happiness might be hiding in Option Number 147.

The Crawl Space Olympics

The biggest challenge was repairing that damaged floor joist.

That’s when I learned another new term: sistering.

No, it has nothing to do with nuns.

It means installing a new joist alongside the damaged one. Simple concept. Less simple execution.

The replacement joist was a sixteen-foot-long 2x10.

A beast.

My first challenge was getting it through the crawl space access opening. My second was dragging it across the entire length of the crawl space.

Naturally, the master bathroom was located on the farthest possible side of the house because why would anything ever be easy?

Picture me crawling on my hands and knees through a dusty crawl space while wrestling a sixteen-foot board.

Lots of grunting. A little groaning. Several rest breaks. And occasional negotiations with gravity.

Eventually, I got it into position.

The floor is now stronger than when the condo was built.

Probably stronger than I am.

Accumulating a Small Fortune in Tools

After weeks of research, I finally settled on a Tile Redi shower pan and a GoBoard wall system.

That decision alone probably consumed enough mental energy to power a small city.

I also discovered a little-known technique called wet shimming.

Naturally, I watched several hours of videos on that because apparently this is who I am now.

Then came the laser.

I bought a 360-degree green laser level after learning that plumb and level aren’t suggestions when installing large-format tile.

They’re commandments.

The laser projects bright green lines across the room and instantly reveals every flaw in the walls.

It’s basically an expensive device that hurts your feelings.

The walls weren’t perfectly straight.

Of course they weren’t.

Nothing built by humans ever is.

So now I have flooring, the shower pan, tile, GoBoard, thinset, spacers, leveling clips, waterproofing materials, trowels, a wet saw, a laser level, and enough supplies to convince the neighbors I’m opening a tile store.

Standing at the Starting Line

The funny thing is that the shower isn’t even built yet.

All I’ve really done is tear things apart, fix what somebody else did wrong thirty years ago, and spend an embarrassing amount of time watching strangers explain mortar coverage on YouTube.

Yet somehow, it doesn’t feel like wasted time.

A few months from now, I’ll be standing in that shower admiring perfectly aligned tile, and nobody who visits will have the slightest idea what went into it.

They won’t know about the crawl space.

They won’t know about sistering floor joists.

They won’t know about wet shimming.

They certainly won’t know the difference between Carrara and Calacatta marble.

Most people will walk into the bathroom, glance around, and say something like, “Nice shower.”

And honestly, that’s exactly how it should be.

But I’ll know.

I’ll know about the afternoons spent crawling through fiberglass insulation. The endless Home Depot runs. The YouTube professors. The laser level. The debates over grout color. The ridiculous number of choices required to build one simple shower.

And every morning when I turn on the water, I’ll remember that for a few weeks there, a retired guy became a student again.

Maybe that’s the hidden gift buried inside all these choices.

Yes, there are too many of them. Far too many. Enough to drive a person crazy.

But they also give us something our parents and grandparents didn’t always have the luxury to enjoy.

The chance to keep learning.

The chance to stay curious.

The chance to become completely obsessed with something nobody else on earth cares about.

Which reminds me, I have another YouTube video to watch.

Apparently there are six different opinions on grout joint width, and I’m only familiar with five of them.

Series: The Shower Chronicles
[1. The Great Shower University] • [2. The Shower Was Never the Project] • [3. A Thousand Little Decisions]