How to trim a tricky corner?

4 years ago

last modified: 4 years ago

We ended up with a tricky corner at the edge of our shower enclosure as the trim wraps a pony wall, and I'm trying to figure out what will look best to trim it. The shower has cove base tile lining it and in a coulda-shoulda-woulda world, I would have continued the cove base as trim throughout the bathroom, but we instead planned to match the 7" wood trim in the rest of our house. The floor tile is already installed and grouted assuming wood trim, so using the cove base there after the fact won't work well. (I know we could get sanitary cove base and set it on top of the hex, but I think it would look odd given that the shower cove base is flush with the floor tile, so the height would be off.) What's the best way to wrap this corner?

There will be fixed shower glass on top of the curb here and the wall tile will end in line with the curb (so there will be about an inch of painted wall on the inside). The pony wall is HardieBacker CBU on the inside and drywall on the front edge, so not sure if there are things to consider there too. The tilesetter suggests pulling the wood around the corner and scribing it to the curve of the cove base tile, but not sure how that will look. We considered mitering a piece of the cove base to cover that small edge, but thought that would look strange since the wall tile will end at the edge of the curb. Are there other good ways to do this?

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Comments (4)

palimpsest
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
I think I would want to cut out a few hexes and wrap that cove tile around the corner to the end of the face of the pony wall, and reset 4-5 hex tiles. I would not want wood base right there. But I would have tiled around the face of the pony wall and ended with bullnose on that left most corner.
artemis78
Original Author
4 years ago
Thanks--yes, we definitely considered wrapping the tile (and in fact considered tiling the whole bathroom, but it was too pricey!) Opted not to do it mainly because of the amount of mitering needed to wrap the corner and the potential for that going very sideways, but it's turned out that the tilesetter is pretty skilled at that and could have handled it. I will ask about wrapping the cove base (though there is also the complication of the fact that we don't have any that isn't flat top...solvable with time and money but trying to be mindful of both!) The upside is that the inside edge isn't especially visible unless you're down on your knees looking...but I will notice it.

Also frustrating because I intentionally had that pony wall built a bit long to try to avoid tiling issues with the curb, but instead just created different ones and gave up an inch of clearance for the trouble. Lessons learned.
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artemis78
Original Author
4 years ago
Oof, and looking at the work from yesterday, I realized the tilesetter cut down all the 4 1/4" cove base to match the height of the curb...not at all what I intended, though it looks fine (and actually maybe better visually since there will be 3"x6 subway on top, capped with 2" bullnose) but means the tile wouldn't align to the height of the trim if it were continued out of the shower. It does look good with the cove base overall, though, so if I can figure out a way to do the sanitary base, maybe that's the way to go.
artemis78
Original Author
4 years ago
Bumping this since we are finally (!) ready for trim and still stuck on this. We considered (again) and ruled out using a tile trim, so are definitely using wood baseboards. I would like to use 5.5" baseboards since these will match the existing baseboards in the adjacent closet (which needs some pieces filled post-reno) so we can just get one size. The 7" that was in the room before it was converted to a bathroom looks much too big now. But this means the trim will hit about a half inch over the top of the curb. Is there a way to make this look good? Is it worth doing 4.5" baseboards instead so that it hits below the curb top?

Here's the other side of the curb, which also has this issue: