Stain Resistant Shower Pans

[DanMcD]

I'm looking for a stain resistant shower pan to replace my current one. I have an old Neo angle shower pan (I think it is Swan, but not sure) which has dirt stains on it which I could never find a way to remove, There is also a rust stain on it from a shaving cream can that is impossible to remove. It seems these stains are buried deep into the slip resistant surface. Any recommendations on the best replacement shower pan would be appreciated.

[Basement_Lurker]

Any firberglass/acrylic pan is going to get dingy after a while, even with regular cleaning. Have you considered setting a darker coloured pan? Or using a tiled shower base with darker tile and small sealed dark grout lines?

In any case, never store your bottles, especially metal cans, on the shower floor. There are numerous shower shelf/basket products that attach to the walls of the shower with suction cups so that you don't stain the floor or create a nice spot underneath the bottles for mildew to form.

[turkeyvulture]

I'm planning on putting in a Kohler cast iron shower pan, because the shower gets used all the time and any plastic type pan eventually gets beat up.

[miamicanes]

If cost is literally no object, your best bet is probably Corian. If you stick to a standard size and one of the cheaper color mixes (ie, off-white, almond vs "Black Galaxy" or one of the stonelike varieties), a 3x4 pan will probably run about $1,200 (at least, that's what I remember from ~3 years ago when I last researched it).

Corian shower receptors are definitely exotic items that absolutely have to be ordered online, because they're strictly a niche product -- they're expensive and have zero "wow" factor for builders showing off a spec-built home because all the "affordable" ("A" cost) versions look like cheap plastic, and the nicer colors are breathtakingly expensive by any sane standard.

That said, if you can afford it... and especially if you can afford to do the walls with it, too, it's probably the most maintenance-free shower you could possibly have. From what I remember reading, the gold standard is to hang the wall panels, then bevel 1" x 1" pieces and fuse one into each corner and the wall-floor wall-ceiling borders.

Unfortunately, I think the "100% solidly-fused" shower idea only works somewhere that's completely non-seismic, like Florida. Someplace like California, even a minor earthquake would probably cause some REALLY expensive damage to it (as in, stress fractures and/or splintering) unless you settled for caulked joints (so they could jiggle a bit without tearing each other to shreds). On the other hand, I remember reading about a dotcom millionaire in Silicon Valley who wanted it really badly, so he brainstormed with his friends and had the contractor build him a reinforced concrete shower box using ICF (theory: in a bad earthquake, the whole box would move as a monolithic unit while holding the Corian motionless relative to the other Corian, with the foam additionally acting as shock-absorbers). I remember people commenting that someday, the rest of his home might be reduced to rubble by "the big one", but at least he'd still be able to take showers ;-)