Great, okay. Hey, everybody! We’re live! And in this video Steve and I are going to
talking to you about how to do a tub-to-shower conversion. And so we’ve been working on
this, I should say Steve’s been working on this shower all day. We’ve been filming
and making videos that we’re going to be posting to YouTube. And we’re going to show
you how to build this shower using the WEDI Fundo Primo System. We are going to have a
step-by-step video tutorial on YouTube showing you how to do that.
So this is great if you are in fact doing a tub-to-shower conversion and you want to
build a curbed walk-in shower. And obviously we’ve shown you how to do curbless walk-in
showers, too, and we’ve got videos on that on YouTube that you can look at.
So I’m going to step behind the camera, and Steve is going to show you everything
that has been done today in terms of the planning and the prepping of this curbed walk-in shower
system. And then he’s going to kind of hint about the next steps that we’re going to
take, and I think that will be cool for you if you’re planning a shower system.
All right, and then we have some other things that we wanted to talk to you about at the
end of the video. So hang tight; I’m going to jump behind the camera here.
All right. Hey, guys. So if you saw that last video, we removed the basically standard one-piece
tub and shower enclosure. You can always check that out, what we’ve done before. But basically
what we’ve got today is we got some new insulation. We put some Roxul insulation up.
And we custom built a bench for the shower. Now I always get a lot of questions from my
clients or DIYers that are doing this and how to do about doing this. It seems simple,
but you kind of have to think ahead as far as when you’re going to tile this thing
and how that’s going to look. And basically that will kind of determine the height and
the width. So as we say yesterday, that other fiberglass
tub width is 32” wide, and I wanted to maximize the size of this shower. So to this little
bump out wall that we have here, we have about 36 ½”. So the idea of keeping this bench
shorter than this opening is basically when we get a chords top—this is just a piece
of marble that I have here. But imagine you want to have an overhang like you do on your
countertop and your kitchen counter or anything else. So you want to have that overhang extend
out to the edge of this wall. So you need to have the bench shorter than that wall area
so that you have enough room for this overhang. In my opinion, if you brought that overhang
out past the wall, I think this kind of looks a little sloppy, kind of a little forced.
So basically I kept it in about an inch from the edge.
And basically the construction of this is really simple. I basically just kind of created
a knee wall. Most benches, in my opinion, should be about between 22” and 24” overall
height. So right now we have 20 3/8” to top of this. And then we’ll be adding the
WEDI Board. You cover the top of this to waterproof this. And that’s the reason why you want
to use this ¾” plywood. You want to have something stable and be able to keep the load
of this thing. Because WEDI is only ½”. This is pretty strong stuff. I mean it’s
not flexible by any means, and it’s not like your packaging foam that you get with
any of your products. So it’s pretty stiff, but you still want to have a good, solid surface
for it to anchor to. So we’ll be having this on top of it and then our final countertop.
So by the time we get that countertop, we’ll be about 22”. But you can really customize
your bench to whatever height is comfortable to you. So let’s go ahead. I’ll just show
you the WEDI system. We cut down the WEDI system to fit this area. It’s 4 foot by…
I think it came out 34 ½”. So we got a 3x4 kit, and we cut it down to fit.
This is the shower pan. And cutting it down really just entails you taking a circular
saw cutting it down to whatever the size you need it and then recreating this dado. And
this dado is what receives like the wall panels. So you basically put sealant. WEDI has a special
sealant that you put in here, and then you put the board and seal it into place. So that’s
kind of why you need to recreate this dado. Pretty simple to do with a circular saw.
So place this in. You want to have it pretty tight in between the areas. So when you’re
framing this bench, just makes sure that whatever your width is that you’re kind of keeping
it that. You don’t really want to have too much room in between the pan and the wall.
But the kit comes with a pretty narrow curb. This is the lean curb. They also have a wider
curb if you really wanted a larger curb. This would require obviously a bigger threshold.
Normally, this bigger curb is 4 ½” so you probably need about a 6” solid top. Now
this would be easier if you were doing solid tile. If you were just going to tile this,
this might be the better curb to go with because this is pretty slender. Not that that would
be a problem with tiling. It might be difficult to make it look good. So say if you had some
bullnose tile coming around, that’s a pretty slender piece. I’m not so sure that would
look good tile. But having a threshold on top of this allows you to have a smaller piece
on it. Basically the larger the curb, the less shower room you’re going to have in
this situation. And I’ll show you what I mean here. So basically we have the curb…
And by the way, we were keeping this existing floor. I just cut the floor—I cut it with
a diamond blade to cut this tile—and allowed my curb to snuggly fit next to it.
Okay, so same thing here. I’m recessing my curb away from the edge of the bench. And
again the main reason for that is when I have my threshold, I want to have an overhang on
it, but I don’t want it to extend out past my bench. Again, you would have this like
weird-looking… it just would look kind of sloppy if you just had tile here and you just
have this overhang just wildly like that. So if you can make it so that it’s even
with the edge of your waterproofing, it’ll look a lot nicer that way. So we just recess
this about an inch as well from there. So that basically dictated the size of my
pan. My bench dictated the full size of what the area of my shower was. So our overall
shower ended up being about 32 ½” within side of it. So it’s really about the same
width as the tub was. The tub was 32”. Now there are a couple other options. I guess
I should state that when you have this curb top on here—this is just like a U channel.
When you put a bench like this, you’re going to have to have a custom glass cut around
this. You’re not going to be able to purchase like pre-package deal that’s going to be
able to fit over a custom bench. So your local glass company or some glass guy would be able
to come out, measure it, and get that ordered for you. But basically we’re going to have
the door in the middle of that threshold. And if you can imagine, we’ll have this
full bench top overtop. So basically I mean your bench is actually going to be sticking
outside of the shower area. Typically it’s usually about 3” or so. Just keep that in
mind that that’s kind of… What the look is going to be is that the shower bench is
outside of the shower glass essentially. So we actually got a question, Steve, from
David about his configuration with the drain. And we actually do have a solution for people
who you don’t really want to reconfigure the drain. And why don’t you go ahead and
tell them about that. It’s a different size pan.
Well, no matter what you do, if you’re taking out a tub and putting in a shower pan, you’re
always going to need 2” to connect it. So you’re going to have to do some drain work.
But without having to move everything over to like I did here—because obviously the
tub drain was over here, and I brought everything to the center drain—the easiest thing would
be to get a pan system that has an offset drain. And WEDI sells a kit that has an offset
drain that’s approximately 12” from the edge of the pan. So then you can just basically
adapt your 2-inch drain piece to your location. So, yeah [coughs]. Excuse me. I’m going
to have to get water, sorry. So David, we can actually talk to you more
about the drain location and also the size of the drain because I know you said that
you’re using two different diameters. So anyhow, we’ll touch base with you after
the video to see what we can do to help you out with that.
Yeah, I mean the plumbing you’re definitely going to have to basically give me some pictures.
Sorry my throat has gone so dry here. Yeah, so anybody who’s watching the video,
what you can do is if you’re setting up a pan system like this or a bench, you can
send us some picture via email, and we’d be more than happy to help you out with that.
So you can send them to me. It’s jeff@bathroomrepairtutor.com. And we do this all the time for our members,
and we also do that for people who shop on our website for the WEDI system. So you can
send us an email with the specifics, and we’d be happy to help you out with any questions
that you have. Do that, David. Glad to help. Okay, then there is a couple other options
as far as finishing edges. Like I said there is a wider curb like this. But say if you
didn’t have the capability of doing a basically a curbless system, you can buy a ramp. So
as you can see, this is kind of sloped. So if you were doing this system over concrete
and you wanted it to be kind of a curbless system, this might be an option for you because
it just slopes down. Here’s a piece of that pan that we cut off, and basically that just
kind of sets up right against that. You basically use the joint sealant in between there and
set that up into this dado. So it’s pretty easy; it kind of slopes down to nothing.
And then if you ever gotten in a situation where you needed a larger pan than what you
can sell, you can buy one of these extensions. And then you would extend out your pan an
extra twelve inches or so. So that’s always an option if you had some kind of uncommon
shower. So if you had an eighty four inch shower or something like that, you can buy
an extension that would extend the pan out. So there are a lot of different options in
terms of the accessories that go with these systems. And like I said, Steve and I would
be more than happy to help anybody out if you do have a question about it. But the ramp
is really nice for folks who… you don’t want to go curbless necessarily, but you want
to have something that kind of eases into the shower. Even for somebody that you wanted
to be wheelchair accessible, it would be a phenomenal option for you there.
Okay, and we’ll just show you briefly what we did on our plumbing wall here.
The first thing we did was get some SharkBite shutoff valves that basically attaches to
the half-inch copper. And then we put the PEX from the—well, not that further up.
This is kind of like the easiest way to get some shutoff valves on here. This is a Delta
shower valve, so just a standard turn-on. A mixing valve. And then this will go to a
three-port diverter. And I find this to be the best way to go between your handheld device
and then your showerhead. But it is a three-port, so you could actually add on. Like say if
you wanted to put, I don’t know, maybe you wanted to put another showerhead on the other
side of the shower, you could just run that over there. Or a lot of people bring down
rain showerheads or something like that. But my planning normally is that basically to
have the first valve around waist height. So off the pan, we’re about 39”. And then
in between these valves I usually put about 10” to 12” between. So we got about 12”
here. Now keep in mind plumbing codes vary in every state and everywhere in the country.
So you kind of have to dictate to what your codes stick to. But normally like 12” works
out pretty well for me because the escutcheon plates are far enough away, and this is still
a comfortable height for people to turn it on.
And then my showerhead… See the typical showerhead height used to always be 80”.
And I find today with the newer showerheads that that is just too low. A lot of these
shower heads are just getting bigger and massive and drop down further. So I always try to
bring my showerhead up to at least a couple more inches all the way up to 84” depending
on how tall the person is using it. But the standard 80-inch mark just doesn’t seem
to work anymore for showers. But this is fairly an inexpensive way to get a handheld and showerhead
put together. It’s just nice in my opinion if you are
a DIYer because you can just, as you saw, Steve just constructed everything out of PEX.
So there’s no soldering inside the wall. Of course if you want to use copper, you’re
more than welcome to do that with this system here, but you don’t necessarily have to.
And like we always mention, you want to leave a little bit of a gap between the two fittings.
So between the crimp ring and the fitting. So always keep that in mind with PEX. But
it’s super solid, and that’s not going to go anywhere.
So our future videos are going to be entailing actually installing the WEDI system, waterproofing
the floor area, and then moving onto the tile work. And the tile work, if you plan this
out before, you can just go ahead and build it and think about the tile that you’re
using and what kind of components you’re finishing the edges and everything. It’s
going to help you to build the shower before. Basically just having this little bit of an
overhang because I know when I have a solid bench is going to make this look a lot nicer
than if I would’ve ran this always straight out the edges of the wall. So it really depends
on your overall look of what you’re putting into the shower and custom building it.
Yeah, so guys, we’re going to wrap up this video. But in the next videos we’re going
to be doing we’re going to show you step-by-step how to install this WEDI Fundo Primo curb
shower system. Now we put a link down in the description to our website that shows you
the different systems and the different sizes, and you can take a look at them. And, you
know, they’re definitely not cheap. But here’s the deal with WEDI. So whether you’re
a DIYer or you’re a professional contractor, you get a 10-year warranty on the system.
And that’s one of the things that we really, really want to highlight with these shower
pans. Sure you can put a mud pan in for literally like $300 and you’re done, right? But who’s
going to warranty that system? And that to me is a big problem because I want to know
that this is a solid system that’s going to last for years. There’s going to be a
warranty that the company covers, and you don’t get that with a mud pan system unless
you’re using something like KERDI over top of it. But even then, if the mud pan itself
fails, you kind of have an issue. And the traditional mortar bed system works
great if you do everything properly. But some of the problems might not even arise for 3,
4, even 5 years later. Because once that mortar bed gets completely saturated with water,
and the weephole systems that are on the existing drains, once that they clog, that’s when
you have problems where you start to smell mold and water’s just like sitting in that
floorbed and not going anywhere. Whereas this system and a lot of newer systems that are
out there, everything’s toppable so all the waterproofing’s on top. So as soon as
water gets underneath of that tile, it goes straight down into the drain and it’s gone,
rather than just filling up the whole mortar bed with water and then just eventually drying
out. So really the old system works great if you know how to do it and run through with
all the issues that you can have with it. But these systems, you’re just kind of in
a way it’s a little bit foolproof as far as having any future problems with it.
Yeah, so again, if you have any questions about the WEDI system, please contact us.
We’d be more than happy to help you design your system if you go through us to purchase
it. We do that a lot, and we’re happy to do it for our fans and our customers.
So again the link is down in the description if you want to check out the Fundo Primo system.
We’ll help you design the system so that you save money and you build an efficient
shower that’s going to last for years, hopefully decades.
So that’s it. We’ll see you in the next video. We’re going to have a ton of them
coming out. And like I said, we’re going to show you how to build this system step-by-step
down the road. All right. Thanks for watching this video.
We really appreciate your time, and we’ll talk to you soon.