Frame a Shower Knee Wall With Blocking Ready for the Glass Door

The Problem

The short wall beside a shower does three jobs at once — carries tile, closes the toilet alcove, and anchors the glass door — and each job has a requirement: code clearance off the toilet, a dead-plumb line to the structure above, and solid wood exactly where the door hardware lands. Frame it as an afterthought and the glass installer finds drywall where screws need to be.

The Technique

1. Locate the wall. Measure off the shower base — this one sits 3-1/2" out, a stud-width wall. Check the toilet side: 15" minimum from the toilet centerline to the wall is the floor, 18" each side is the gold standard.
2. Project the line up with a laser and mark where it crosses the trusses — that's where the wall ties into structure. Snap your plate lines on the floor.
3. Build the frame: bottom plate, two top plates, studs on layout. Where a stud lands on concrete, fasten the bottom of the wall with a concrete anchor.
4. Add the glass-door channels. Build a vertical channel of blocking where the door mounts, and a second one on the side panel's line, running a couple of inches past the shower pan's footprint. The overrun means the drywallers can finish clean and the door hardware still finds framing.
5. Make it rigid. Tie the wall into a joist or truss with a long structural screw — the creator runs a 5" ledger screw, leaving about a half-inch gap at the base of the connection point — so the wall can't rock when the door swings on it. The more of the framing member the screw catches, the better.