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:
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.
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