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Second floor shower weight concerns

16K views 23 replies 9 participants last post by  Smithanator 
#1 ·
Hello everyone, this is my first post but have been searching around the board for the last few months and have found a lot of great advice. I haven't been able to find a definite answer regarding my question so here it goes.

We are remodeling a second floor master bath and am having some concerns about the weight of the new shower. The bath is 13x13 and will have a 4'x7' shower with the walls tiled to the ceiling 8'. The shower will sit on one outside wall and the rest is over the kitchen. Total square footage for the tiled area for the shower walls is approx 152sqft. With my figures the tile is 3.18 lbs/sqft or 483.36lbs, durock at 2.41 lbs/sqft or 373.92 lbs then about 70lbs of mortar and another 70lbs of floor tile. Grand total of jut about 1002lbs. The trusse system for the second floor deck is 2x4's that are 14" deep and have about 14' span between load bearing walls. Subfloor is 3/4" OSB with an addition 3/8" sheething screwed to the ditra underlayment specs of every 6 inches.

Is this too much weight for the second floor or am I okay?
 
#4 ·
CAUTION I"M NO ENGINEER.....?

And if you are very worried.... call an engineer.... even an engineer could not answer your question here with precision....

We no nothing about the load specs or spacing of your floor trusses... or how your flooring was attached..... Confused about your durock and ditra assembly???????

As general, your floor was probably designed at 10 or 20 lb dead load and 40 live load.... this does not consider any pecular point load and probably with a 360 deflection design.

CAVEAT.... I would think a engineer would say you are fine, as your load is not abnormal... but you ought to double check with an engineer, especially as you seem suspect and uncertain.

If your design was not as guessed, yes you could have excess deflectioin that could give you problems with your tile/grout cracking/kitchen ceiling dryall cracks etc.


Good luck.....
 
#5 ·
The trusses are spaced 24" o.c. and the home was built in 2007.

As for the durock and ditra...the ditra is on the floor of the bath and there will be a ProVa foam shower pan with water proofing membrane and the durock is on the shower walls...3 4x8 walls and one 7x8 wall with a bench built in.

Maybe this should be moved to a tiling forum?
 
#7 ·
Wish I could get the plans/specs but my builder went out of business and now way of finding any of that info out. It seems like this kind of construction is becoming Kore common and I can't be the first one building a tile shower of this size in a second floor bath. Really just want to know if anyone has run into problems with the weight. Thanks for your help thus far.
 
#8 ·
Any chance that big shower wall is the exterior one? That's would be a pretty big reduction in the floor load.

It's too hard to guess deflection with an engineered truss and no idea what the wall structure on the first floor is, etc. to predict what could go wrong. It is a lot of weight. People overload stuff all the time and it's just fine, but then there's that one job where it all goes wrong...

Was the original bathroom built with a tile shower or a insert? I'd be pretty suspicious of the joists in a developer house with an insert.

If the bathroom is 13x13 and the joists are 14 then it sounds like you could get in there to add support pretty easily.
 
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