Installing Tin Roofing On The Shower Walls

Taking a slightly different approach with tin roof wall covering.

Covering walls with galvanized roofing panels is a fairly simple project. Which may be one of the reasons that it has become fairly popular. I’ve seen it used in places from tiny houses to restaurants. I really like the look and it’s definitely durable. I mean, yeah you could scratch it, maybe slightly, but your not likely to knock a hole in it. It’s been something I have been wanting to put somewhere for a while now and shower walls seem like the perfect place.

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So when we were remolding the bathroom in The Tin Can, we went back and forth on exactly what to do with the shower walls. We would talk about going with the tin roofing, then we would decide just to paint. The ideas went round and round for awhile. Finally, we decided to just to paint the shower walls. The thinking was, not many people are going to see it and the paint will brighten it up some. So that’s what we did. It came out looking pretty good. But then… as I was pulling the painter’s tape off the edge of the tub, the paint started peeling off the wall. Ugh! That led us to the decision to cover the wall with tin roofing.

The Hunt

On our next trip to Lowe’s, we looked at the different styles of roofing tin. We didn’t want something that had too high a profile to it. In an RV shower, every bit of space is precious. We didn’t want to take up any more of the space than we had to. That gave us the idea to use 5V roofing panels. It’s the one, pictured above, that has one v down the middle and two down each side. It doesn’t intrude the shower area very much and also has large flat areas that would make reinstalling the faucet easier too. All of that made us feel like we had made a good choice. So we picked up two 12 foot pieces and headed home.

Angelica had earlier, when we first decided to use the tin roofing on our shower walls, got the idea that since we were going to repaint the bathroom cabinets. Yes, repaint them! We had originally painted them light blue to match the color scheme of the rest of the trailer, but the color just wasn’t working out. She thought that black cabinets and red tin on the shower walls would look cool. So we painted the roofing sheets with red tractor paint. It seemed fitting since we were going for a rustic, Pacific Northwestern theme. It was also her idea to have the panels bent around the corners instead of butting the joints together.

Installing The Panels

To bend the roofing, I thought about clamping the panel between two pieces of wood and try to bend it that way. But instead, I did some calling around and found a local metal fabricator that bent it for me. They turned out perfect, I don’t think I could have come close to making the bends that they made for me.

As usual, there had to be some sort of problem. This time it was with painting the roofing panels. The first coat of paint went on beautifully. But then when it came to the second coat, the paint started wrinkling up. I stopped and sanded back to bare metal. Started painting again and any place new paint went over existing paint it did the same thing. I think that it might have had something to do with the temperature of the metal. With it laying on the concrete drying it was a good bit cooler than the air and paint was. Whatever the reason for it, we figured it was best just to let it dry like it was. There again, it adds to the rustic look. To add a little more to th look, we also scuffed up the paint in a few areas with sandpaper.

The install went pretty good though. The pieces that had been bent lined up perfectly, I trimmed the front and back pieces, cut out the holes for the faucet, then de-burred all the edges with a small file. To fasten the panels to the wall, I used hex head sheet metal screws with a little bit of silicone applied to the threads and 3M Hi-Strength 90 spray adhesive to hold the panels tight against the wall. I sprayed the back side of the panel and held it in place against the wall. Then, starting at the bottom, I worked my way up the panel, evenly spacing the screws. I spaced out the outside edges and the top and bottom screws closer than I did at the joints in between. It all went together easily and shower walls came out looking great!

The Shower Walls Completed

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