Below you will see a tile layout that is very popular around the world but here in Canada and the United States sees little action. The shower floor is one large square with the shower's drain (drain is a knock off of the California Faucet's Style Drain) dead center.

There are many ways to do this installation when a smaller tile is used like a 1"x1" tile, 2"x2" tile or even a 4"x4" tile but when the tile size is 12"x24" it's a little harder. I worked on many different tile layouts for this shower and settled on this one. Looking at the shower floor it's important to remember that this type of install requires greater skill and more care with the cuts to make it look just right.

Every single tile on the shower floor has at least one or two cuts on it. We even needed to reduce the width of the floor tile so that two tile set would meet the larger white tile's grout joints. When working with such large format tile you might think that this makes things easier but we find that the opposite is true and the larger the tile the harder it is to make for perfect shower grout joints.

I shaded this picture to highlight the tile layout's pitch or grade to the shower drain. Notice how the pitch runs in only one direction. This means water hitting the tile say by the WWW in the picture above would run towards the WWW then follow the grout line to the shower. The extra diagonal cuts allowing me to set large format tile into a shower with a regular point drain.

California Faucets makes the nicest point drain in this type of shower drain. I do not care for their CeraLine linear drain at all but the point drain or Style Drain is a great product. This type of install also works for linear drain installations and by stretching the shower wider you could insert say an ACO Tile Insert Drain and achieve the same kind of design.

We dry fit the tiles (after they where cut to width) and then pencil in the cut line. I like to set section by section to ensure the tightest grout joints and most even look.

You can see the care taken to get everything just right. Levels. Straight Edges. Ram Board for the floor protection. You might be wondering why there is a gap between the new tile and the shower floor. This gap is to create a slope outside the shower to the wet zone. This shower offers up a few other safety features and I will discuss them in a later blog post.

These tiles are set with a 1/8" grout joint. I do not like working with smaller grout joints since they offer up less adjustment and no forgiveness if the tile is slightly out of true.