Master Bath - Shower Floor

We wanted our shower floor to be either teak slats or pebbles. The teak slatted floor would be $500, which exceeded our budget for the entire shower. Moving on to the next option - pebbles. We could buy these for $12/ sq ft. but we didn't like any of the colors/textures (remember these are going to be stood on barefoot!)

And the ones we found that we did like were $27/sq ft plus freight charges, plus a two week wait. Well, what about these pebbles...

In my half-hearted search I found no law against beachcombing in the state of Washington, so beachcomb we did. My helpers only wanted to collect glass so I was pretty much on my own.

The start of our collection:

Not quite enough so about 6 trips to the sound later, I had collected enough flat, smooth and beautiful rocks to fill our shower pan. Or so I thought. Here is a picture of my estimation. But when the guys* went to actually put them in we came up about 1.5 ft short. So I went back to the sound found some more and came back and installed them myself before the thinset had all dried up. This wasn't so easy and a lot of the rocks the installers had done were coming loose b/c they had only used a thin layer of mastic. I used a thicker layer but that made the mortar come up the sides and potentially cause problems for the grouting (which would be what really holds the rocks in place). I scraped some of mine down the next day and when I was vacuuming up the dust we had a few casualties as rocks got sucked up and out of the floor. I made a small batch of mortar and replaced the missing rocks.

Finally finished product! The rocks are in and aren't going anywhere!

* We decided due to lack of time and declining gusto to have our carpet/wood/tile installers do our two main showers for us. We didn't want to risk messing up what we thought to be some pretty cool designs. Did they think our designs were cool? Well Fred (the main tile guy) didn't like the colors I chose for the glass "waterfall" in the shower (he suggested a yellow - gold color?!) and did not like the pebble idea. Maybe because they had to be installed individually? Regardless, it turned out great.

** We did have two main hiccups on this project. One was the glass I ordered, and waited 10 days for, and drove to Seattle for was the wrong size. 1 x 1 instead of 1 x 2. They expedited it and had it to us three days later. The second was actually a hiccup averted - when the installer was putting in the glass he was going to put it in backwards because he thought the shape of the glass was wrong the way it was on the paper. Luckily I was there and we avoided having him install the paper backing (which was yellow and would have shown through) into the mortar.

***Third was a heartbreaker - I had selected some of my very favorite and best rocks to show the installers prior to doing the project. I just found them in my bag, I forgot to put them back in the rock bucket. Bummer!