What the work is
A curbless shower has no threshold. A walker rolls in, a chair rolls in, and nobody lifts a foot over anything. It is the single most useful change you can make to a bathroom if staying in the house is the goal.
It works or fails on the floor build-up. Water has to run to the drain from every point, the waterproofing has to be continuous and turn up the walls, and the shower floor has to sit low enough relative to the room that the fall works without a lip. In a slab-on-grade house that usually means either recessing the drain area or building the rest of the floor up.
It is not a job to take on with a linear drain and hope. We will tell you what your floor needs before you commit, and if the honest answer is that a very low threshold suits your house better, we will say that too.
What is included
- A survey of the existing floor build-up and drainage before anything is quoted
- Forming the fall, and recessing or building up as your floor requires
- A continuous waterproofing system installed to the manufacturer's instructions
- Linear or point drain, set true
- Tile or panel, set to the fall
- Blocking in the walls for bars and a seat, now or later
- Testing with water before anything is closed
What is not
- Structural alterations to a floor, which need an engineer and are quoted separately
- Moving the bathroom's walls or door
- Electrical, which is our licensed electrical partner's
- Anything we cannot make drain properly. We will tell you that at the survey, not afterwards
Slab-on-grade is the local constraint
Most of the housing stock here is slab-on-grade, which means there is no joist space under the bathroom floor to drop a shower pan into. That is the whole reason curbless installs here need thinking about rather than ordering.
The guide below works through the options honestly, including where a curbless shower is the wrong answer for a particular house.
Ask for blocking while it is open
A grab bar has to take a 250 pound force, and that force is carried by what is behind the wall. While a wall is open, blocking costs very little. Afterwards it means opening it again.
Our team includes a Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist. That certification belongs to a person, not to a company, and we describe it that way because it is the truth.
What to ask anyone quoting this, us included
- What is my floor build-up, and how will you get the fall?
- Which waterproofing system, and installed to whose instructions?
- Is blocking included, and where?
- What would make you tell me not to do this?
