MiamiCanes
New Member
I have a problem: my house has one full bathroom upstairs, and a half bathroom downstairs. I need to demolish the full bathroom to the bare concrete and studs & rebuild it due to a major mold problem (the usual... drywall behind tile, plus a blocked exhaust fan that apparently blew hot, steamy air into the wall cavity instead), and I'd really like to use Kerdi & tile for the new shower+tub. The catch, of course, is that even if I hired a professional to do everything, I'd realistically be looking at at least a week of downtime with no shower... and I'm probably going to do it myself (translation: 2-4 weeks of downtime).
I was brainstorming last night, and came up with the idea of buying a freestanding fiberglass shower. They seem to cost around $250 for everything besides the actual supply and drain pipes, and would solve my problem nicely during the remodeling period. GETTING water to it is no problem... DRAINING it is another matter entirely.
So far, I've come up with two ideas that are kludgy, but might work:
1. Temporarily remove the upstairs toilet, remove the adjacent tile and drywall, then set up the shower directly above the toilet's floor drain so water from the shower goes straight down into it. If the toilet's drain is too close to one or both walls, I might have to build a ~6" wood platform from 2x6's and plywood to raise the shower and make room for additional bent pipe needed to shift the shower drain's output a foot or two. I'm not sure, but I *think* there's a trap in the toilet's drain (as opposed to relying upon the toilet itself to furnish the trap). I have access to a bad photocopy of my house's construction blueprints from 1982, if that info would be on it somewhere.
2. Put the shower next to the stairs on a wood platform to elevate it ~6", connect a decent-quality garden hose to the drain through the necessary adapters, then run the hose ~3 feet horizontally, ~10 feet vertically with ~5 foot horizontal displacement, and secure it so it dumps the water into the bowl of the second bathroom sink below.
Obviously neither solution is ideal for anything long-term... but we're talking about a period that's likely to be ~3-5 weeks, with one person (me) taking one or two showers per day. In this scenario, if I can make the temporary shower happen for $300 or less, it'll be worth every penny because it will enable me to take my time and do the bathroom's reconstruction properly, instead of being tempted to recklessly hurry things along (drying time, etc) or make last-minute compromises with long-term consequences because something I need to do the job properly is out of stock/unavailable *right that second* and I'm desperate to finish the job *asap*.
So... are there any non-obvious problems I'm likely to encounter with this idea (particularly the toilet-drain variant)? Or does this sound like a decent strategy for solving a major logistical problem?
I was brainstorming last night, and came up with the idea of buying a freestanding fiberglass shower. They seem to cost around $250 for everything besides the actual supply and drain pipes, and would solve my problem nicely during the remodeling period. GETTING water to it is no problem... DRAINING it is another matter entirely.
So far, I've come up with two ideas that are kludgy, but might work:
1. Temporarily remove the upstairs toilet, remove the adjacent tile and drywall, then set up the shower directly above the toilet's floor drain so water from the shower goes straight down into it. If the toilet's drain is too close to one or both walls, I might have to build a ~6" wood platform from 2x6's and plywood to raise the shower and make room for additional bent pipe needed to shift the shower drain's output a foot or two. I'm not sure, but I *think* there's a trap in the toilet's drain (as opposed to relying upon the toilet itself to furnish the trap). I have access to a bad photocopy of my house's construction blueprints from 1982, if that info would be on it somewhere.
2. Put the shower next to the stairs on a wood platform to elevate it ~6", connect a decent-quality garden hose to the drain through the necessary adapters, then run the hose ~3 feet horizontally, ~10 feet vertically with ~5 foot horizontal displacement, and secure it so it dumps the water into the bowl of the second bathroom sink below.
Obviously neither solution is ideal for anything long-term... but we're talking about a period that's likely to be ~3-5 weeks, with one person (me) taking one or two showers per day. In this scenario, if I can make the temporary shower happen for $300 or less, it'll be worth every penny because it will enable me to take my time and do the bathroom's reconstruction properly, instead of being tempted to recklessly hurry things along (drying time, etc) or make last-minute compromises with long-term consequences because something I need to do the job properly is out of stock/unavailable *right that second* and I'm desperate to finish the job *asap*.
So... are there any non-obvious problems I'm likely to encounter with this idea (particularly the toilet-drain variant)? Or does this sound like a decent strategy for solving a major logistical problem?