Here you can see the shower room after I coated everything. The membrane (called Kerdi) is about the weight of tar paper, with one side covered with a fleecy material. You just spread thin-set (unmodified) onto the wall (backerboard or fiberglass-faced drywall like DenseArmor) and bed the fleece side into the mortar. Then you basically treat it like wallpaper and use a large trowel to squeeze any excess mortar out from behind the sheet and get any air bubbles out. You overlap all of your edges by at least 2" and they provide you with pre-made corners, so you don't have to figure out how to cut things that fit into the corner. I can never cut the squares in the right way to flash corners, so those were very nice. It only took me about a day to figure out what to do and do the whole shower, so I'm really pleased with the Schluter stuff. Since we didn't install a steam generator, I didn't have to kerdi the ceiling, but I wanted to show off our shower light.
I have always wanted to use the pebble tile and the 12 sqft of our shower room is about the only place I can afford to use them, so I went for them. Installing them is fairly easy, grouting them is hell. Ignore any recommendation about grout coverage guidance and buy the biggest bag of grout you can, you'll need all of it. You'll also need about 10 sponges and as many buckets filled with water as you can find. Then prepare yourself for a mess.
I've heard of advice to use your hands to put the grout in, but I think those people are crazy, that sounds even messier. What worked for me was cleaning as best I could with the float and then letting the grout dry longer than you normally do. I think the quantity of the grout makes it dry slower, so I had to let it set for 45 minutes or so before I could start working it down to where I wanted it. It was firm enough I had to scrub a little bit in order remove grout, but that made it relatively easy to get to the exposure that I wanted. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. Before you grout, you'll want to seal the pebble so that the grout comes off a bit easier, I used the Dupont Stonetech Sealer, Enhancer, and cleaner. The seem to be really good products, pricey, but good. The difference between this sealer and the spray-on sealers is night and day. Water beads on the grout in the shower, and no water condenses on the grout on the walls, it's pretty impressive. I also used strips of the pebble tile for an accent strip (about 4" wide) about halfway up the shower wall and a strip of little 1" tile just below the ceiling. We used a faux-travertine tile for the walls, as we wanted something low maintenance in there.
Here is the little cubby I built in. It's a bit.... cramped. I made the hole the size I wanted, then I boxed it in (-1"), then I membraned (-1/2") and tiled (-1"). So now it's a little small, but it still works to hold razors and normal size shampoo bottles. We'll have to add an aftermarket shelf to augment the storage (http://www.raficreations.com/existing_tile_installation.html).Lastly, here's a picture of our showerpanel. It's red and fantastic (if painful to install). A word of warning, these things mount REALLY close to the wall, so cut your stub outs and install threaded (male) adaptors that just barely come out of the wall before you membrane or tile anything. I didn't do that and had a hell of a time getting things to fit.
It was a lot more work than a steam shower (which requires plugging in), but it came our really nice. We'll install a frameless glass door at somepoint, they're expensive and the shower curtain works fine for right now. But otherwise, it's ready to go and a pleasure to use.
