The Ultimate Guide to Building a Preformed Recessed Shower Niche

Part 3: How to Modify your Recessed Foam Shower Niche

In this post we cover:

Situations where you would consider modifications

A technique to check if your foam niche is still waterproof

Method and tools to customize a foam shower niche

Staying out of trouble

Otherwise known as How to Void the Warranty on your Shower Niche

In part 1 and part 2 of this guide, I talk about how to layout and install a foam shower niche. But not everything always goes perfectly. Tile doesn’t always lay out perfectly centered in a stud bay and if it does it may not be the location that you would like. Sometimes you’re close to making it work but not quite.

Other niche building posts:

Planning and Design

Installing a prefab niche

Building a custom niche

This post will give you a couple of examples where I’ve made modifications to the niches. It covers why it was done and how I did it.

Please keep in mind that this isn’t recommended and no manufacturer will approve of this process. Proceed at your own risk. 🙂

Situation 1: The foam shower niche sticks out past the wall too far

It’s not unusual for the niche to want to stick out slightly from the wall. After all a lot of backer board these days is 7/16 inch- thinner than the niches. In the previous post, I had a photo of a technique that I use to keep the niche in place until it dries.

But sometimes a little bit further customization is in order. That’s where this technique comes in.

I personally have never tried this but it’s mainly because I’ve never thought of doing this. But it’s a clever way to make your foam shower niche work in the space.

Situation 2:  The niche needs to move less than one inch

I recently had a project where I wanted to center the tile on the shower faucet. But the problem with this is that the niche wasn’t going fit a row of tile perfectly. In this case, it was about 1/4 inch off. So this meant that the tile would be 1/4 inch off center of the shower faucet. So what did I do?

I cut the end of the foam niche off.