Review (5/5): Honest DIY review...
Ok let me start out by giving a little background. My wife and I have ZERO experience with construction. We have over the past 20 years begun DIYing our home. We did a complete makeover of out 1978 yellow steel tub and yellow toilet with vinyl floor. It was hideous.. We spent a year researching fixtures and construction methods for making our own walk in shower. After looking at the costs we found the ariel to be cost contender with the amount of renovation we would have to do and to get the wow factor we were looking for…Don’t get me wrong it was not the cheapest but it was surprisingly cost competitive and seemed fairly simple assemble. We did just that – the bathroom took 1 week to complete and the shower was 2 days for the 1 week. I found the instructions fine with a few issues with the electric EFI circuit I was lost on but the folk where we purchased it from were awesome with the tech support. We got ours from atlasusa.com. The only issue we had which is well documented is the drain. I underestimated the importance of installing a dedicated drain and simply used the supplied flexible drain provided. After a couple days of very slow drainage, I was able to fix the issue quickly and it has worked flawlessly every day since July 2013 (over 6 months). I use the steam function nearly every day and the shower uses very high quality hardware. I did remove the hair catcher and the other junk they had in the original drain and if I were to do it again I would have put in a permanent drain and scrapped the provided drain from the beginning. We smile every time we use the shower and everyone who walks into the bathroom, still 6 months later, comments on the shower. I could not be happier. With the new drain we do lift the floor up once a month, just to make sure its clean and working well down there. The wood is holding up great so far even with daily use and I would recommend this project to anyone. By the way it was a perfect fit as a replacement for our existing bathtub. Fits snug wall to wall…If I could attach a picture I would, but it looks and works great! This was 100% installed by 2 middle aged people in 2 days with 1 phone tech support call....