The Best Tips To Properly Install Bathroom Shower Tiles

If you’re going to be applying tiles in your bathroom tub or shower stall you’re going to want to make sure you do it accurately. If you don’t, you can end up with various draining issues or you’ll the layout of your tiles will be out of order and won’t look nice.

We recently finished up a full en-suite bathroom renovation in Paris but while were in the process of tiling shower stall walls we decided it would be a good idea to shoot a video giving you some expert tips on applying the tiles.

We know there are a lot of do-it-yourself people out there that like to give home renovation projects a try themselves, so before you apply that tile, make sure to watch the video below before you do so you can do it the right way.

Video Transcript

Hey everyone, this is Brent, the owner of BCJ Renovations. We’re in Paris Ontario and we are starting a large custom bathroom en-suite renovation. If you look around, you can see this orange membrane on the wall. This is a Schluter product, and we tend to use it a lot. It’s requested by a lot of our clients. It actually waterproofs the shower area.

So the entire wall will be covered with the Schluter membrane; as well as the floor.

This area here (points to niche kits), these are actually those Schluter niche kits that you can buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s. They’re really kind of cool because, a lot of the older bathrooms don’t have it; clients like it because they can put their soap on here (points to soap insertion area on wall) and put the shampoo right here.

If you come down here (look at the floor), if you look, our drain is perfectly centred in the shower area. This is extremely important because anyone can lay tile – it may not be perfect – the most important thing about laying tile is mapping out where your tiles are going to start, and where they’re going to end.

If you look on the wall here (points to wall with level) we have a centre line for the tile. So, (picks up tile) these are the wall tiles that the client requested; so as you see here, we start exactly in the middle; and we have guidelines here in red. So before we tile, we’re going to make a line here and here (traces first leveled tile), it’s going to be perfectly level; and that line is going to be followed straight up the wall. That’s to make sure our tiles are completely when we install the rest of them.

So if this is off (points to shower membrane) by an eighth of a quarter, or even a 16, we’re going to know right away based on the guideline as to whether we’re off or not.

This is very important because, I’d say we probably fix ten bathrooms a year and it’s always because of bad tile work improper installation, and spaces being off.

So preparing a grid on your wall before you tile is even more important than actually installing the tiles.

If you come down here (bends down towards the floor tiles), I have a level here; you have to make sure that your tiles are sloped properly towards the drain. As you can see the bubble is not level, level is way up here right? So we know that our water is going to drain properly. 

Another thing that is very important that I see all the time is that the tiles will dip, or this tile will be lower than that tile; or there will be a bubble here; so that’s where water sits.

Tile work is a trade. A lot of people don’t think it’s a trade but you have to sometimes individually cut the tiles out so you have a perfect slope going towards the drain. If you run your hands across this you’ll see that its perfectly level.