We couldn’t find the shower enclosure we wanted, so we built it ourselves

Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.

The shower enclosure we had in our heads didn’t exist, so we made it.

We wanted something that felt less like a standard glass cubicle and more like part of the room – a window-style partition, painted in the same green as the panelling, with brass fittings and enough character to hold its own next to our vintage sink. We could picture it perfectly. We just couldn’t find it anywhere, certainly not at a price our renovation budget was ever going to forgive us for.

So the search for the right thing turned into a plan to build it ourselves, which is roughly how most of this house has come together. Most of the questions we got when we shared it were about the obvious bits – the glass, the paint, the brass – but a few people asked something more specific: what stops the timber rotting? Fair question.

We’d shown the frame going up and the tiles going on, but skipped the least photogenic stage in between, so the join between the two looked a bit more like a leap of faith than it actually was. So here’s the whole build, missing stage included.

Where the idea came from

We’d already agreed on a pony wall to hide the pipework and split the room without closing it off entirely. What sat above it was less obvious. A standard shower screen would have done the job, but it felt too sleek for a room built around terracotta floors, beadboard and old brass.

Then Andrew turned up one evening with an image saved from deVOL – a utility room with a window-style screen dividing the space, brass taps below it, more like part of the architecture than a piece of bathroom kit. That was the moment it clicked for both of us. We weren’t trying to copy it exactly, just borrow the idea of a glazed partition that felt like it had always belonged there.

Building the frame

We started with the studwork, forming the pony wall and the taller section behind it, which gave us somewhere to hide the pipework and a solid base for the glazed frame above.

The outside was wrapped in moisture-resistant beadboard, and we tiled the inside up to the top of the pony wall before building the frame – so we knew exactly how wide it needed to be, rather than guessing.

For the frame itself, we used 34mm pine, with thinner battens arranged on the dry side to create the grid of window panes. We measured and dry-fitted it more times than either of us would care to admit, because a slightly uneven grid has a remarkable ability to look very uneven once it’s painted.

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The detail most people miss is that those little panes aren’t individually glazed. The whole grid sits behind one full sheet of toughened glass.

From the room, it reads as a proper multi-pane window. From the shower, it’s one continuous surface with no tiny corners for soap and limescale to collect in. The timber grid stays on the dry side; the glass does the actual work of keeping the water in.

The stage we didn’t film

Before any tiles went on, we treated the whole shower area with a Mapei Shower Waterproofing Kit – the tanking system that sits behind the finished surface and protects the walls and the vulnerable junctions around the tray and enclosure.

It’s slow, repetitive, and disappears completely once the room’s finished, which is exactly why it never made it into the video. Tiles and grout are the bit you see; this is the insurance policy underneath.

Finishing it off

All the woodwork was primed and painted in an exterior-grade eggshell (colour-mated to Farrow & Ball’s “Dibber”), then given a clear acrylic matt topcoat to stop water soaking into the paint. The small amount of trim exposed inside the enclosure got extra attention – waterproof lacquer on every edge, silicone on every junction.

The glass went in last, cut to size and held with pin nails and timber beading, sealed all round with clear, water-resistant silicone. Then came the virtually frameless glass door with brass hardware – simple enough that it more or less disappears, leaving the green window frame to do the talking.

If you’re planning something similar

• Plan the true wet zone first, and work out how the waterproofing meets the tray, tiles and glass before you design the decorative frame.
• Waterproof before tiling, following the kit’s instructions properly rather than your own best guess.
• Use toughened glass cut to the opening, and design the frame around the glass, not the other way round.
• Keep timber in the wet area to a minimum, and protect every face of it, not just the side people can see.
• Treat silicone as part of the design. It needs to be continuous and easy to check, not an afterthought.

Would we do it again?

Absolutely. It took a lot more planning than buying a screen off the shelf, but it solved the exact problem we had – definition without blocking the light, brass and green tied together, and a finish that looks far more bespoke than the fairly ordinary materials it began as.

More than a year of daily use later, it’s still doing exactly what we wanted. We keep an eye on the paint and the silicone the same way we would in any bathroom, but it’s held up exactly as it should. Sometimes the thing you can’t find is just the thing you haven’t made yet.