Rough framing for tub too wide

[RJNAPA]

I am finishing off a bathroom in an unfinished basement. Roughly 5' x 10'. The builder had framed 3 of the walls when they built the house, the two long walls are load bearing and have vent pipes installed in them already so they can't easily be moved at this point. My problem is that they framed the two long walls a little over 61" apart. I need to install a 60" tub and am trying to figure out what to do about the gap.

My thought at this point is to just rip down a bunch of 2" x 1" spacers and nail them to the studs along one of the walls. I guess I would have to do that the length of the whole wall to make the sheetrock and cement board line up. Plus add spacers to all the blocking.

Does that make sense or am I missing another obvious solution?

Thanks

 

[Terry]

You can shim the entire wall, or just at the tub. There are ways to trim that out. The hotel at Seaside last weekend had done exactly that. One side was a little fatter at one end of the tub. It was a large 72" long tub, so as a plumber I was thinking genius. It would have been a bear to get in at a plus 1/4".
It's a lot easier to shim a wall than it is to move the wall out. We installed a tub in Seattle that was longer than 60" out of the box. We had to trim wall studs to move the tub in.

 

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[Jadnashua]

Having the opening a little larger MIGHT allow you to have the tile end up flush with the drywall on both ends, but you'd have to be careful about the vapor barrier behind it and the tiling flange. It might be easier if you were to use something like KerdiBoard on the walls to tile verses cement board (cbu) since the surface is waterproof verses putting a vapor barrier behind the cbu. It's more common to have the tile proud of the wall, but then that means either bullnose (expensive and not that available) or some other trim on the edges of the tile to hide that edge. Having it flush has advantages.