Waterproof A Bathroom Floor Before Tile! Schluter Ditra

Okay, so we're gonna be setting some Ditra over this plywood. Biggest thing is you need to have a Ditra trowel, which is basically a 3/16ths inch square notch trowel. But they do make a trowel that's specifically for Ditra. I think that's 11/64ths. Rule of thumb, leave a quarter inch perimeter gap all the way around for expansion and contraction. So don't just go butting this straight up against the wall. You wanna have an expansion joint. Uh, and... You basically wanna be using that same consistency of thinset that we use for all the membranes. Take a damp sponge and wipe down your subfloor. Get any of that dust off of here. And this also prevents the thinset from immediately wicking into the plywood and it basically gives it a little bit of a better strength if you dampen down this subfloor. The flat side of your trowel, you wanna take the flat side and burn this. This is considered burning it into the substrate. So just taking that flat side, I'm just scraping it into the substrate. This will fill in any divots, and it makes it easier to get some good directional troweling on your ridges. But this just ensures a good bond to that floor. And then you want to do directional troweling, having all these ridges in the same direction. Okay, so it's also not a bad idea just to pull this up. Make sure you're getting good coverage. It's not terrible. I do see some blank spots here. See, that's looking pretty good there. You can see how that's kind of sucking out. But I am a little thin right here in the middle. So I'm just going to add a little bit more just in this center area. It doesn't hurt to check it again. But yeah, that looks a lot better. You can see it's pretty much, there isn't any blank spots anywhere. So then you can piece in as many pieces as you want to fill any areas that you don't have filled. So in order to waterproof this, we're going to use our KERDI-BAND. Okay, so we're just going to band this as normal here. So when you're banding it to the DITRA, you need to fill in all the waffle before you trial it. So it does take up a little bit more thinset to do that. So do these screws. Okay, so anywhere you have a seam on the floor, you need to put some KERDI-BAND over that. After that. So fill in that waffle before you go directional trialing. If you want to be extra cautious, and really it makes a lot of sense to me, In case you have a run over of the tub or anything is to basically seal all the corners. So this will make really the entire bathroom really waterproof and it only takes a couple minutes just to do this so I think it's definitely worth the extra expense and just a little bit of time to do this but you're just going to put it all the way around all the corners so that you need to do one additional thing. So I usually take like an eight inch piece, cut this right in half and then this will make my corner. Apply more thinset in the corner. Let's sit this right in that corner. Okay, so then you tuck that in as tight as you can. And then you take that flap and you pick it up and you just put a little bit of thinset underneath of that. And then this will make a nice waterproof corner. So again, just fold this guy, tuck them right in the corner here. And then you just need to pick up this flap, put a little bit of thinset underneath of that. Okay, so around this toilet flange, what I like to do, So I just take a pipe seal, so this is just a 3 quarter inch pipe seal, you can get these at the big box stores. And basically just take this and we're just going to cut out the center. So let's just mark this. You're just going to leave the line because I want it to actually seal to the pipe. So that's the point of this is to have a seal against my pipe. So let's just get some thinset, fill in our waffle around the toilet. We'll use some Cardi-Fix, so you want to use this on your pipe. So I'll provide a nice seal around here now. And then what we'll do is after the tile we'll cut this flush with the tile and then set our flange. But this really gives you some extra insurance if you ever had a toilet leak, it's not going to leak around the pipe and go through the ceiling. It's really all contained in the bathroom. Okay so with this excess thinset, since this is kind of expensive stuff, I would definitely recommend if you're not going to tile right away, just go ahead and fill in this waffle so that it's all prepared and ready to go for tiling the next day. The only thing I want to mention about this is when you're scraping this off You kind of want to see some of this orange You don't want when you're when you're filling this in you're just filling in the waffle and you're scraping off as much as possible you don't want this to be overly floated or You know bumping up or anything like that. So you really want to see the orange Ditra And you're just kind of scraping it all off. If you don't get all the cavities filled, not a big deal. When you go to actually start tiling, you could fill it in then. This is just a way to use some of that thinset. And really, if you were using smaller tile, say if you're using like a two by two tile, this does make it easier because you're not having to worry about filling in the cavity as you're setting the tile. So this just kind of takes away some of the effort when you're Just setting tile to have this all filled in the night before.