A big part of deciding where the shelves would fall had to do with the way that the horizontal tiles would sit. And here’s a little bit of a surprise, because last you were informed, we hadn’t decided on how to finish the shower: I landed on white subway tiles, cheery and clean and white and inexpensive, I couldn’t be happier.

We found them priced even lower than originally reported in the shopping post (at only 23-cents/tile), and because I bought with a 10% off coupon, the entire 70-sq.ft. load cost me $116. Tack on another $30 for mortar and grout, and let’s call it a happy day. Let’s face it, if I had gone with a fancier tile, $116 would have only covered 10 sq. ft. of one wall, yikes!

OK, back to the shelving layout.To figure out where the shelves should be installed on the wall, I comped up a little faux-wall layout on the hardwood floor, using the floor boards as a level, the real-life 3″x6″ tiles, and the 1/8″ spacers to demonstrate where the grout would lay. (Manufactured subway tiles are actually self-spacing, but we both voted for thicker grout lines.) I wavered between allowing the shelves to be 4 or 5 tiles high (5 stacked felt a little high, but when I put my largest bottles of shampoo and body wash in place, adding the 5th tile for pure pump convenience seemed like the right thing to do).

I scribed the tile orientation, grout thickness, and shelf placement onto a piece of graph paper. I realize that our chicken scratch and overlapping drawings aren’t something you can follow, it really helped to have the plan drawn out, every measurement notated, and the whole plan triple-checked.

Because tampering with the chosen wall wouldn’t effect the structure of the house, we started by cutting into the center stud with a reciprocating saw to open up space for the lower shelf.

From there, I built upwards, adding first the lower shelf, side pieces for support, and then the top of the lower shelf/bottom of the upper shelf. Originally, I bought a few new 2×4 boards from the store to do the job, but I found some scraps from previous projects and put those to work instead (returning the new boards will credit me $6, hurray).

The 6 MIL barrier that we used was leftover from a previous project (we gutted and refinished a bedroom at Pete’s parent’s last winter and fortunately went overboard with purchasing the vapor barrier then, but were happy to use the leftovers here). Installation it was easy. I affixed the plastic with as few staples as possible (using the electric staple gun), and except for taking many extra precautions around how the plastic would need to overlap when coating the new shelves, we were able to have the shower entirely enclosed within a short hour.

Although, we did have to make more cuts to fill in the new shelves we built, and that ended up not being so simple. Because the HardiBacker can be dusty, and that dust not good to breathe, all of the cuts were made outside on the deck. In the snow. In 10-degree weather while we wore mittens and wielded quick-to-dull utility knives. I left my camera out of it, but by the time we were done, it was looking really nice. I had even gotten around to taping the exposed edges:

It wasn’t until we began taking Hardibacker measurements for the to the third wall of the shower that we realized we had to make some serious decisions, pronto.

For one thing, the existing CPVC and copper plumbing wasn’t sunken beneath the level of our 2×4 studs (you can get a little bit of an idea of what I mean in this next photo) – laying hardibacker over the pipes would have crushed them, and we were left with one solution: total shower plumbing replacement.

We discovered that issue and promptly decided to stop for the day, happy with our two shelves and two walls HardiBackered. Ooh, dramatic cliff hanger.

More to come next week as I toy with advanced plumbing measures and prepare to tile the shower.