- While it is not common in every home, sometimes while pouring the concrete slab, the concrete finishers will slope the concrete down to the drain during the finishing process. This allows the tile installers to come into a home with an existing slab slope and get right to work. In these instances you don’t have to do any prep other than clean the concrete and install the tile.
- Tile shower pans need to have some form of slope to them so that the water goes down the drain rather than pooling up somewhere in the shower. Specifications for slope on a shower floor are up to a 1/4-inch of slope for every linear foot away from the drain hole. If you have a large enough shower, you can simply grind down the concrete with a sander to achieve the slope; but if you have a smaller area, you will need to float a pan.
- Floating your own shower pan is a very challenging task that is best left to the professionals due to multiple aspects that require skill and experience. The base layer needs to be slurried onto the concrete slab and then a sloped layer of mud added on top of that. A plastic pan liner is then installed and run a few inches up the wall, and the finish layer of mud is floated and sloped on top of that to provide the base for the shower pan.
- All concrete shower pans or floors can benefit from a layer of painted-on waterproofing although it is not a requirement other than when wood is present. You can paint it directly onto the concrete floor such, as with a pre-sloped setting, or you can paint it on top of the shower pan, after you have floated it, to provide your shower with an extra layer of waterproofing and protection.