welcome to the kerdi world, Suzanne :) i have less overall experience than you do - never even contemplated building a wall myself - and I successfully kerdi'd my new master shower. (my ongoing post is "lisa's master bath remodel") we did the leak test last week and it passed with flying colors. haven't tiled yet... still waiting on the tile... but these guys here are amazing with how much help & support they will give you. so definitely take the leap! my coworkers look at my pictures & just shake their heads - they don't even know what half the words mean :) one thing i may have done differently was to practice using thinset first. i'd never even seen thinset before, so i had no idea what it really was or how it would react to what i did to it. i would recommend getting a piece of whatever you plan to have behind the kerdi and practice mixing up the thinset, putting it on, combing it out, etc. once you get that down, i'd even practice on a small piece of kerdi -it's expensive, but my first wall is so bumpy that i wish i had taken a 12"x12" piece and just gotten a feel for things before i did a whole wall. i wish i had gone slower that first day, too, instead of listening to my friend who has done tiling before & said "just mix up a big bucket - it will go really fast" ha! not for me. but at least with a small batch, if you go fast, you can make the next batch bigger. if i can answer any questions, let me know - bill & mongo are the experts, for sure, but i can offer tips as a female & novice if you need that, too :) good luck! lisa p.s. - thankfully i have another bathroom - can't imagine doing it without one! guess you'll have to be speedier than i am! just do a lot of planning & draw everything out to be sure you think about the edges, wall/floor joints, corners, etc.

Difficult to picture whether this would work, but could you do either one (if you could have some kind of bracket at the opposite side) or two (if you cannot have a bracket on the non glass brick wall) vertical (floor to ceiling or top of tub to ceiling) tension rod? - here is one with a shower caddy for $30 - (you could take the baskets off)- that extends to 9 feet high. It could go on the glass brick end of the shower as close to the wall as possible. You could figure out how to attach a horizontal shower curtain rod to it (with screws or other hardware). Then the opposite end of the shower curtain rod could either be attached to another vertical pole (again, floor to ceiling or tub top to ceiling) or some kind of bracket attached to the outside end of the wall opposite the glass brick wall. I can imagine some kind of metal hardware loop that would capture and hold the end of the shower rod, but cannot say for sure what would work. The best might just be two vertical tension rods with a horizontal shower rod screwed to them horizontally (with removable screw assembly for dismantling and storage until you need to use it in your beautiful shower). Here is a link that might be useful: Tension Pole Bath and Shower Caddy

OK, I'm back with more exciting pictures! First, so it doesn't get lost below -- marcolo -- I read installation instructions for a different one of these shower kits to get an idea of how they are installed, and they said do NOT use 100% silicone caulk. I don't know why. Also, it said NOT to caulk the interior where the frame base meets the pan, only the exterior seam. Why is that? Before I ripped this out, it was caulked (and coming loose) on both sides. Anyway, I decided to partially disassemble the shower frame to get a better idea of what is going on and how to fix it. Here's where I am now: First, as you can see, the wall panel was not plumb when it was adhered to the wall. That would be, of course, because they didn't level the pan when they put it in, so when they lined the wall panel up with the pan, it ended up crooked. Duh. Pretty sure whoever installed this never heard of a level. A closeup view shows it even better. The jamb (metal frame part that was screwed to the wall) only barely overlapped the wall panel by the time it reached the bottom. The screws at the top of the frame went through the wall panel, while the screws at the bottom did not. The pan is badly out of level in all directions (the other wall is even more out of plumb, sigh). Now we can see the state of the drywall underneath the panel... ...and it is really not good. Crumbling drywall and scary black stuff (mold?) extends several inches up behind the wall panel. Here's a little drawing I did showing how the studs/drywall/shower wall come together -- or don't, as the case may be. The studs are badly out of plumb too. Easy to see how the slightest gap in the caulk inside the shower meant water getting under the edge of the shower wall panel and wicking up into the green board. Sooo....now I'm not sure where to go next with this. One thought is to cut away (from behind) the edge of the drywall that is sitting down inside the pan, and then insert some kind of extra flashing behind the wall panel so that any water that got behind it would not get any further. Another would be to cut away all of the damaged drywall (several inches) and patch it, adding flashing as in the first option -- again, this would be from behind. No, I don't exactly know how I would do that, but maybe there's a way to McGyver it. ;) I could try to remove the wall panel (it seems to come away from the green board pretty easily), replace the studs (they are not plumb either) and all the green board, and re-adhere the wall panel. The studs are only there to support the shower wall. This could help solve the fact that the wall flexes where it doesn't meet the studs. The risk of course is that I could break the wall panel, and then I'd really be in trouble. Also, I'm not sure how easy it would be to get just the one panel out without having to take the corner and the other panel as well. Removing only the one panel wouldn't address the other wall of the shower which doesn't seem to have leak problems (probably due to the slope of the pan and the fact that the shower head is on that wall) but I would not be surprised to find water damage to that side as well. And of course there's always the chance this is just a complete waste of time and I will have to bite the bullet and replace this shower kit with another. I don't think there's any way to get the pan leveled, and the fact that it's not level really throws the rest of the installation off. I'm not clear on whether removing and leveling the pan would mean having to do something with the drain height, which might be outside of my DIY abilities (though I do have a great plumber I could call). I'm just not too confident this shower can be made watertight enough to not leak into the room beneath. I haven't even shown the issues we have with the seal thingy at the bottom of the door, where water can easily leak out onto the bathroom floor, and I know that if a good bit of water ends up on the floor, that alone can mean a leak downstairs -- water that goes under the baseboard pretty much goes right on through the subfloor. Any advice at all would be very much appreciated. As is my usual habit, I decided to dig into this problem while my husband is out of town, and I'm going to be nobody's favorite person in my house if I don't restore this bathroom to working order pretty soon! (The other shower is in the basement, and none of us really likes using it -- plus it's the same shower kit and I'm betting it isn't installed any more accurately than this one was!)

Your vanity is gorgeous! "I'm such a dummy. I thought I posted this on the bathroom forum. Since like last January! Oops!" Well we have been the lucky beneficiaries of your OOPS and we love all things beautiful! Thanks for sharing it.