Rethinking The Shower

When I visited Ella, my instructor from the Tumbleweed workshop at her tiny house on wheels, she said something that stuck with me when it came to designing my bathroom. She no longer liked to use the shower because it just steamed up all the windows and makes her house damp. She worried about the impact of steam on her house. She did her bathing with a swim in the ocean.

Why have a shower at all? I asked myself. This was my chance to have a Thai bathroom with classic ceramic water jar and those ornately decorated silver bowls used to dip water to pour on ourselves. In Bangkok in the '60s the water pressure was often so low it didn't offer a good shower anyway. Plus we didn't have hot water in our house. (Few people bothered installing hot water systems in the tropics.) Every night my nanny would boil water on a brazier outdoors and haul the large kettle to our bathroom to mix the hot water into a tub with cold water from our water jar. This ritual of being so personally bathed was a fond memory. And now in this modern day we had electric kettles that would do for a hot water system. Why not just do with that? At least until I figured out a solar option. Why were showers so much the norm when half the world bathed from a bucket with a dipper? There was even a number of  YouTube tutorials on how to do so for the traveler. We in the West are so spoiled wanting our own indoor water fall plus there's all that water going down the drain while we wait for the heated water to come. All I needed was a water tight area that would house a drain or what is known as a wet bathroom. A shower pan would do the job.

Also plumbing a shower was a complexity I was happy to avoid. I looked around for a suitable container to use for a water jar. There were two lovely ceramic Chinese urns at the Home store already quite expensive at $60 each. I was sorely tempted, but the idea of a ceramic urn filled with water seemed like a liability when placed in a shower pan that might not bear the weight on a permanent basis. I thought of plastic water barrels, but I didn't like the idea of any heavy object sitting on a shower pan. I turned the problem around to a more utilitarian perspective. Why not just have a bucket hanging from the wall as I'd seen done in stables for watering horses? Those buckets were built to withstand being kicked across the stall.

While I was researching shower pans at Home Depot I fell in love with the shape known as a neo angle and knew this was the direction I would go in. After some in depth research about how to install a shower pan. I turned to the online RV supply houses. A tiny house could go either way with the installation of a shower pan. It could be mudded in with cement as they are in regular houses (I didn't fancy that job) or I could find out how it was done in RVs. But the prevailing problem I learned was that the drain could end up being blocked by one of the supporting beams of the trailer. And when I crawled under my tiny house to see, measuring the best I could where the dimensions of the pan would fall, I feared that the drain would land right on top of one of those beams. That clinched it. My best bet was to order an RV pan because the Better Bath brand offered one that could be had with a number of different drain placement options including one which would completely avoid the beam in question.

And when I studied the installation I could see that the mudding problem was solved with a thick styrofoam base already glued to the bottom of the pan. And while I was browsing the etrailer site I saw that they also offered a water inlet connector that could be installed through the wall so I could hook up a hose to a faucet inside the house. In my world this was a quantum leap from pushing a hose through the window. My tiny house builders had not made any concessions to plumbing and I did not want to take apart the wall to run plumbing through the house. I could however handle drilling a single hole through the wall along with the drain whole in the floor.

For the walls of my bathroom I loved the look of corrugated metal roofing. I bought one to see how it would look inside my house. The light danced off it in a pleasantly surprising way. I did long for something a little more built in than a bucket for the sink option.

I perused the horse supply site for a corner mounted water feeder; there was one, but it wouldn't work because the shower pan would require that I build out the corner at a 45° angle. I looked at other stable accessories and came across an urn like grain feeder in black. It had ribs coming down the round form that suggested a greek column. It was big enough to submerge my biggest pot and at the top it had a counter with a lip that would be perfect for a soap dish. The more I looked at this feeder the more intrigued I became. When I saw that it had a plug at the bottom I was confident that it would work for a sink.

Installation posed some interesting options. Such a feeder is usually just screwed to the wall, but would that hold the weight of water? I felt that I would have to reinforce the installation with lumber supports. Then one night I wondered what would happen if I made the sink removable in case I wanted to use the full space within the shower pan footprint. Whimsically it came to me that I could use a length of PVC pipe with a large diameter for a stand for my sink. The pipe would help support the weight and would also hide the drain pipe. Whether or not it was a removable sink I was now happy that my bathroom design had accomplished my goals and was going to be highly unique.