Microcement Shower Installation: The Order It Goes On

A microcement shower has no grout lines. Not fewer — none. Walls, floor and any niche run as one surface, which removes every joint that normally goes black and every line you normally scrub.

Start with the waterproofing

This is the part to get right before anything else, and it is worth being blunt about: wet rooms live or die on the waterproofing behind the finish, not on the finish itself.

Microcement is waterproof — the microcement itself, not the sealer over it. But that is the surface. The tanking behind it, the falls to the drain, the detailing at the junctions: that is a separate job and it has to be right first. If you have not detailed a wet room before, have a certified installer look at it before you start.

The coats, in order

1. Primer. One coat, mixed 75:25 by weight. It grips whatever is underneath — tile, board, or a tanked substrate.
2. Build coat, twice, with mesh. Fiberglass mesh bedded in. A shower is always Reinforced.
3. Microcement, twice. The surface you see. Smooth is the usual choice in a shower.
4. Sealer, twice. Every job, no exceptions.

About 2 mm of finished thickness, which is why an existing shower can be done without losing any usable space.

Going over existing tile

Common, and it works — but tap every tile first. Anything hollow comes out and gets filled. Degrease the whole surface; soap film will stop primer gripping. Fill deep grout lines so you start flat. The mesh spans the rest.

What a shower costs

A shower surround of around 100 sq ft costs roughly $2,675 in materials on the Reinforced system. A shower floor alone costs the same $2,675 — because both need one unit of every product.

Which is the argument for doing the whole bathroom at once. Adding the walls and floor of the room to a shower you were already doing costs very little extra in material, and takes the per-square-foot cost from around $27 down to about $13.

Microvella ships late 2026. Join the waitlist and we will email you the day it is ready to order.

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