Bootleg Cellar Shower

So you're getting your only shower replaced. It's going to take weeks, and you need a place to shower in the meantime. Yeah, you could join a gym for a month. But, a better option is to rig up a terrible rinky-dink bootleg shower right in your own cellar.

You will need some of the following, but you can probably improvise.

• A cellar with a washing machine outlet
• A collection of old lengths of garden hose and connectors. This is your "plumbing"
  • Pro tip: thin-walled hose will burst when used with hot water
• A garden hose sprayer. This is your "showerhead"
• A plastic tub (a nasty old greasy thing that you use to clean bike parts works great). This is your "drain".
• A submersible water pump.
• A faucet assembly
• Various scraps of plywood, MDF, masonite, whatever.
• Some bricks or cinder blocks
• Plastic sheeting

• In the corner of the cellar, lay out some bricks/blocks to provide a support for the floor.
  
  • Pick a corner that the plumber won't need to access!
• Lay down a piece of plywood (or whatever) atop the bricks for the floor
• Slide the plastic basin partway under the floor.
• For "wall framing" just lean some scraps of plywood against the cellar walls and/or use a file cabinet, old shelves, etc. Anything that will stay mostly vertical.
• For the front lip, I attached a piece of wood using 3 nails. I consider this a personal failure. I should have used duct tape.
• To the untrained eye, the final product should look indistinguishable from a random pile of wood in the corner.

• Cover the floor with plastic sheeting.
  • Let the sheeting run up the "walls" for at least a few inches.
  • Affix the plastic to the walls with duct tape and/or staples.
  • Let one small section of plastic fold down and into the plastic tub. This is the drain.
• Staple sheets of plastic to the ceiling joists, and let them dangle. These are your walls.
  • Make sure the wall plastic overlaps the floor plastic.
  • Attach wall plastic to floor plastic with small pieces of duct tape.
• Finally, staple one more plastic sheet to act as the ceiling.
  • Make sure it overlaps the wall plastic
  • Again, use random pieces of duct tape to stick the two pieces of plastic together, if you feel like it.

• From your washing machine outlet, attach two hoses, one for hot and one for cold
  
  • Use tee fittings if you want to keep your washing machine connected as well
• Attach each hose to the inlets on your faucet.
• Attach another hose to the outlet of the faucet
• Just kinda leave the faucet laying on the floor unless you've got a better idea.
• Run another hose from the submersible pump to wherever your washing machine drains to.
• Plug the pump into a GFCI-protected outlet. That way, when one of your connections inevitably fails and spews water all over the place, it's funny instead of deadly.

• You probably won't be able to stand up in this contraption, so you might consider the luxury of a plastic lawn chair.
• Make sure that side of the cellar is really messy. Move some file cabinets and shelves in front of your new shower. Pile a bunch of books and old VHS tapes on top. This will hide your awesome shower from any nosy plumbers or city inspectors.

No more trekking all the way to the gym!

Pro tip 1: Go ahead and spring the extra few bucks to get metal hose clamps instead of plastic.

Pro tip 2: Don't forget to turn on the drain pump before you get in the shower. That probably would be bad, not that I would know through personal experience or anything.

Pro tip 3: Maybe keep a bathrobe or something down there. You might not want to be naked and shivering while you're making an emergency repair. Again, not that I would know.