- Okay, so now before we put the KERDI panel on,
you can see we finally got more of the Reflectix insulation
in place here.
And you can see, we also added some more blocking,
because I like to have more places
to screw the panel into, so you can see
we added these blocks here, as well.
So here we're just doing a little dry fitting in.
You can see why we like to add this blocking.
Whenever I know I'm gonna have two sheets joined together,
it's always a good idea to have a block there
that you can screw them both into.
Alright, so now that we're starting to put
some of the Schluter panel boards up here,
and this is true of just any type of cementitious board
or any other panel that you're going to put up here.
And the saying goes, you know, with carpentry
when you hear the guys talking about building stud walls
and stuff you'll always hear them talking about
you know, build a true, level, and plumb,
those are the three keywords that they use.
And it's the same as true here.
So I like to use my carpenter square here
as I'm putting the panels up.
And I wanna make sure that I got
an absolutely perfect 90 degree point here.
So here we're gonna put this down here.
And you can see right in this corner here
I'm like absolutely perfect, it's just...
And if you look in the corner here,
you should look along here and you shouldn't see,
you know, any gaps, you shouldn't see any big gaps
where light's seeping through.
But I'm gonna come up here a little more, right?
So right here, you can see a little bit.
See about 1/8 of an inch.
And here you can see a little bit, too
that's 1/8 an inch.
Well, you can't have that because you're gonna run
into problems with your tiling.
So what you have to do is, you gotta make this
what we call true, level, plumb.
You have to find a way to let a little bit of this board
come back out to meet this square
so that we'll have perfect 90 degree walls here.
Now, you can do it with the wood shims here,
or you can do plastic shims.
But as you look here, you can see
that it may look pretty straight to your eye,
but let's put the spirit level up here.
And you can see, if you look at the bottom panel here
and you focus right there and you look,
it's pretty much level there, that looks good.
But if you notice if you start to slide upwards,
look right along in here.
You might see a little bit of a gap starting to form
because you've got waviness, you've got unevenness.
The studs that these panels are attached to
have crowns on them.
They curve, they curve in and out and up and down.
That's why you never get a perfect walls.
And on top of that, the cement block
that these studs are attached to,
the further you go up towards the ceiling here
it really curves back to the point that it can be
off almost a half an inch and we see this quite a bit
with houses.
But here you can see now,
our bubble is no longer in the center here.
So what does that mean?
Well, how are we gonna correct that?
That means the level has to come back on the bottom of it
about this far which is about almost 3/8 if you look
at the bottom of the level in order to maintain that.
So what do we do?
Well, we can stick shims in here to pull the panel back out
a little bit.
What I'm gonna do is I wanna mix some
thin-set mortar and I'm gonna mix it very, very dry
and we're just gonna level it up and make a shim here.
We're gonna pile some of it onto all of these studs
so we'll have a dynamic leveling type system
that we can just sort of mush it down a little bit
and adjust it as we need to and then we won't set
our screws in until it's completely dry.
So that is how we're going to level this.
So you can see here, once we pull the bottom board out
a little bit, this board will then, in order to make it
all straight and everything, will have to come out
just a frog here, so we'll put some on here.
So you can see the difference here in these studs
because how far back the brick wall was like
leaning backward as you go up.
So that's what we have to mitigate.
And then this little section here...
See, also when you're checking your plumb and level
with these boards once they're attached
and nothing means anything until they are all screwed in
by the way.
So that's why you're gonna put them in,
you're gonna screw everything in a little bit
and keep playing with them until you get the level right.
But you wanna put your level this way, this way,
you know, go down here, too.
I wanna make sure that this section here
is directly over this section
but you can see, there's a gap right there, too.
See, that's about a almost a quarter of an inch.
So this panel is gonna have to come out.
We're gonna undo this screw here
and stick some mortar behind it there to act as a shim.
And we won't screw it in all the way until we get everything
perfectly level here and it's all dried
and set behind there.
Now, I should point out to you
that The Tile Council of North America in the handbook
they really don't want you to use mortar as a shim.
But I believe that's more on the floor
than it is on the wall.
Here, you're just using it to give a little backing on here.
You're not using it as really that much as a load.
So I think we can get away with it here.
And if you're worried about that,
you can always use wood or plastic shims.
The reason why I'm not gonna use wood is
'cause you would have to stick so many in here.
And if you fix one, another one falls out.
There's just too many unknowns here.
So we're gonna slap our concrete on every one of these
studs here.
That way we'll just have a nice leveling bed
that we can go in and out, up and down,
whatever direction we need to.
So that when we're done and we're going like this,
it'll all be completely, perfectly straight up and down,
absolutely perfect and that's the way it has to be.
And when we're done, we'll be able to take
our carpenter square and we'll put it right back here
in the corner and you won't see this wiggling anymore.
If we do our job right.
Okay?
Let's get to work.
See what I've done here, is I've started to apply
some of the thin-set mortar here.
In some areas I laid it thick
where I know we're gonna need more distance.
In some areas, I made it a little thinner.
And we just kind of applied it to all of the studs here.
Now you can see, I made it nice and dry
so it'll stay in place.
And the whole purpose of this is based on the same theory
as when you're doing marble tile
and you build up the marble
onto your bed of dry pack mud there
in order to make it level.
So we're gonna put our KERDI panels right on there
and then we'll be able to dynamically adjust it
by the depth of the thin-set
until we get them nice and flat.
Then once it sets, we'll screw them in perfectly.
Alright, so right here in the middle of the board
if you remembered, we said we were gonna have to
back it out a little bit.
So we've shimmed it up from behind
with a little bit of mortar there.
And it'll dry like a cement.
So it'll dry nice and firm there and it'll hold it
into that position.
So now, right now, as it stands, this is perfectly level.
And, on top of that, if we take our friendly square
back out now and take a look, you can see
it's absolutely, perfectly square.
There's no light sneaking through, there's no gaps.
If you remember before it was wiggling
by about 1/8 of an inch.
So now I'm gonna move it up here to the top here.
And you'll see the same thing.
It's in there just nice and perfect.
And all the way up against the edge of the panel.
Whereas if you saw a few minutes ago, it was wiggling
and we would've had a very crooked tile install.
But this right now is just absolutely perfect.
And another reason why this is important
is if you just kind of look at this seam as it goes up here
how it's nice and straight, you're gonna have tiles there.
And so you wanna make sure you have
a nice straight grout line going up the corner there, too.
Okay, so here we're getting ready to put the second panel up
where the niche is gonna be.
And what I always like to do, if look right down here,
is I always line my boards up
so they're absolutely perfectly straight
right over each other so that the lines can continue.
Because remember when I set this thing originally,
this lower board here,
I made sure that this line is like perfectly level here.
And so by doing that, I can be assured I can use
these as great reference lines as I'm tiling.
And so I wanna continue that all the way up here.
And then if you look on the side here, you'll see how
the mortar is just kind of sitting there.
So we're gonna be pushing in and out
and as we add our screws in
and we're not gonna screw them all the way.
We're just gonna make them tacky enough
so that we know that it's flat.
Perfectly flat, straight, level, plumb and all that stuff.
And then when we're done with that,
we can screw them in later on once the mortar dries.
Alright so we're kind of checking our level here
from like top to bottom here making sure
there's not like any gaps here that way and this way.
So it's starting to come along, it's getting nice and flat.
And as you add more screws, you have to go back and check
'cause if you screw in over here,
it might undo something over here.
Now, if you look from here at the very bottom
all the way up, you can see it's nice and vertical.
Look at the bubble there.
But as we get up towards the top, look what happens.
You can see a little bit of a gap right there.
So we're gonna have to maybe shim up a little more
even behind the panel right there near the top.
And this happens quite a bit with concrete block walls.
They always get real inaccurate near the top
and they lean back, it's common to see that.
My friend's house, we had this.
It was leaning back a half an inch off of the top
of his brick wall.
It was terrible.
So what we have to do is just loosen this a little more,
and we'll shim up behind it and stick a little more thin-set
back in there and let it dry at that angle.
That way we'll know our board's gonna be nice and straight.
And if we bring it over here and see what we've got,
it's looking pretty good here, too.
Nice and straight.
And over here, I think it was actually
quite textbook perfect right there.
So, let's continue on.
Okay, so we're putting the little pieces here
for the very top.
And you can see right here as I push the piece in,
it's almost like tiling,
you'll see it kind of ooze out
as it finds the true front level there to be straight.
You wanna make sure you don't feel any lippage
from one panel to the next.
Then I'm gonna put the upper right panel in here.
And do the same thing there.
Just kind of mash it down into the thin-set there.
And we'll leave these like this to dry and once they dry,
we'll go ahead and put our screws through them there.
I'll put them in now just to get them in,
make sure that they're in
in case you don't wanna be combating
the dry mortar later on.
But we won't tighten them down.
So what I'm gonna do now is just get my level out here
and check from the bottom panel, to the middle panel,
to the top panel.
So you can see, this one's gotta come out a little bit, too.
So we're gonna have to shim this one a little more.
We may have to stick a little more mortar in there.
And maybe even an actual shim, too,
to get that thickness to match.
And then once it does, and once it dries,
we can screw through to it.
So here we are,
we can see just how much distance we'll need
and we might even need more than this.
Yeah, so we're gonna put a little bit more thin-set mortar
on there and then ooze it down.
So here we are the next morning,
and you can see we've come in and all the mortar is dry now.
You can see right here, just how much we had to stick
in front of this stud here.
We had to build it up about almost 3/8 of an inch.
And you'll see it tapers down to a minuscule amount
right here, but it just goes to show you
that last foot and a half sometimes
how the whole brick wall can lean back enough as it goes up.
But at least now, this entire panel wall here
made of the Schluter KERDI boards
is now completely totally vertical.
So now we can go now and tighten down our screws.
And then I wanted to show you
something over here at the window sill.
So this is just utterly ridiculous here.
This is something really dumb that the builder did
when they built this house.
So they had built this well right here
in front of the window.
And they way they did it was they had this,
they had formed a shelf in the window sill here
made out of tiles and it was at a steep angle like this,
it was just so ridiculous.
I'm sure it's functional and it drains water
if any water lands on it
but you can never put up any of your champagne,
oh, champagne, your shampoo bottles on there.
And the problem with this is there was nowhere
for the homeowner to put their shampoo.
It was like the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
Unbelievably steep.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna thin-set down
some of the KERDI panels.
We have to do one layer and thin-set down a second layer
and then a third layer.
Very similar to how they do the benches with KERDI.
And then we'll just shave the extra right off of here.
So this will build a level up here
and then when we go to tile it later on,
we're gonna put an entire single piece of marble
on the sill.
We're going to finish putting up all the rest of our
screws on there.
We need plenty more screws here on the field
of the wall here.
And then after that, we're going to attach all of our
little KERDI squares, the little...
to cover up all of the screws here.
And then we'll put KERDI band going down the seams here,
down the corners to make everything waterproof
before we can tile.
Well, here we are the next morning
after we're almost finished
with all of the KERDI band and the waterproofing and stuff.
So you can see what we did here is
over each one of the screws and washers
you have to put a little piece of KERDI band
and you cement it down with the mortar.
And we got almost done.
And then you can see wherever we had seams,
we used the KERDI band.
There's some here.
We go all the way up the corners.
All the way up to the ceiling there.
And then we're gonna have to get some
and put some here on this corner here.
And we've preformed them here.
We'll take a little piece of it and we kind of crease it
to make the corner right here, these outside corners.
So we just have that to finish today.
So what you are looking at now is
about two hours of work between two people.
It gets quite messy and there's a lot of cleanup
and there's time that it takes to mix the mortar, as well.
And then what we're going to do here,
let me show you this piece,
this is the mixing valve gasket cover here.
This will go here and what we're going to do is,
to match it to this wire opening here,
we're going to have to cut some of this around here.
And it's a great idea to always leave a big space in there
for in case plumbers have to get in there in the future
to put in a new mixing valve for you.
And in fact, a lot of people make this mistake is,
and I was helping a friend out a few months ago
where the builder left even less space than
what you see here and we couldn't even get the cartridge out
to change the cartridge for the guy.
We had to chisel the tile around it,
which is dangerous because you can break the tile.
So it's really foolish when people tile
all the way up to the thing here.
You gotta leave a nice big opening like that.
That's why this piece is designed like that.
That's how much space you are supposed to have.
And then, we're going to use this piece here,
which goes over the pipes.
You slip it over and it fits nice and
down here, it fits nice and snug over the pipe.
And we'll cement that in place.
And another one will also go up here
for the shower head pipe, as well.
And once we finish that, we'll be ready to go ahead
and start tiling.
Okay, I also wanted to show you here.
This was the big plastic niche that we stuck in here.
And the way the manufacturer wants you to do it is to...
Once you get it screwed into place,
they want you to trowel out the thin-set
to flare it out kind of like if you were dry-walling
to a corner on the dry wall.
And that just gets it kinda nice and even.
And then we're gonna come by with our scraper
and scrape off all of the little boogers and pieces
that stick out and try to get rid of all of the crumbs.
And also, the manufacturer of this because it's plastic,
wants you to use a polymer modified thin-set
which is luckily what we're going to be using here.
And they're so adamant about it that they even have
this warning sticker telling you about it.
And they want you to wait 24 hours for it to dry
when you put the tiles on here
before you grout because they wanna make sure
that it can really cure because you're up
against the impervious type material here
and it won't cure enough so you really got to wait
a day or so before you can add your grout to that.
Then lastly, along these windows here
before we add any more KERDI band or anything,
we're gonna get some door and window silicon caulk
and we're going to caulk all of these gaps here.
This is just extra insurance on top
of our KERDI water-proofing system
but we're going to caulk all the way around the windows here
and get all that done.
And then same at the bottom of the tub up in this area here,
we're gonna caulk all along all the way around the bottom
of these KERDI boards here.