Everything is Figureoutable: Week 5 of the One Room Challenge

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This Week 5 of the One Room Challenge with Apartment Therapy is a continuation of Week 4, with just more tile. Though this week the focus has been the bath/shower area, where I had to remove the old tile, then this week I worked at chipping away at the old mortar and patching and waterproofing any weak areas.

old cement board, finally cleared of mortar!

This is only one option. There are a couple of other options when it comes to re-doing a shower, and it really depends on your budget, how much time you have, and the state of the substrate underneath the old tile.

For instance, since my tile came off the substrate (cement board) pretty easily, it seemed logical to leave the cement board in place. Now, it did take many hours to remove the globs of mortar that remained, but it saved me quite a bit of money.

Alternatively, I could have removed entire sheets/pieces of cement board, mortar and all, and replaced it with new cement board. Cement board is similar in price and installation as drywall. Inexpensive, but comes in large sheets that may require delivery and two or more people to install.

The third major option would have been to use a waterproofing paneling from Schluter. Their KERDI system includes a waterproofing membrane that you can spread across all of the areas -- walls, floor (if shower), niche, seams, etc. Since this is expensive, I elected to just patch certain areas with it, rather than re-do the whole shower.

I'm working with 3 walls, and removing the mortar from the 2 smaller walls was not that bad. The larger wall was rough, and I just could not get that sheet of tile off the niche! So that wall is the one where I really worked to repair and waterproof with the membrane, and I waterproofed the niche fully as well, using the inside corner kit from Schluter.

orange is the Schluter waterproofing membrane

Now onto the major challenge of this week, which was removing the small bit of "backsplash" tile that was in the niche, which I had to do before I could waterproof anything.

stubborn niche tile

This was a small format tile sheet, different from the large tile I was able to knock down easily with a chisel. This thing would just not come out! It was also tough to get good leverage with the way that niche is shaped. I tried a tile chisel, a crowbar, and ultimately I just started banging at it with a hammer. This was working! It was cracking the tile so I could take it out little piece by little piece! Then I realized I had completely hammered through the tile and through the wall behind it, creating a hole in my bedroom.

woops

Once this happened, I realized I had to lean in and just make the hole bigger to finally get that tile out. So I used my oscillating multi-tool with a drywall blade to cut out the entire thing, about 14x16 inches -- drywall and tile and all. And I had a couple of drywall scraps leftover that I was able to get it patched up, and then waterproof the niche.

I'll handle the patching in the bedroom later on. Or as my kid said, maybe I can just hang some art over it.

all patched up

If you check out my posts on Instagram or TikTok, you'll also see I grabbed the Satin Brass trim from Schluter for the edges of the shower! It's looking really good and these trims are super easy to work with. I'll show more of that detail work in Week 6 once I hopefully make my way BACK out of the shower and finish this tile!