There are lots of reasons to convert a tub to a shower. This post explains all the steps for converting a tub to a shower on a budget. Replacing an old leaky bathtub and tub surround can be surprisingly expensive. That’s why converting a tub to a shower can be a sneaky good value. Read on for tips and tricks!
The Situation
These clients lived in a three bedroom, three bath home in Cedar Park, TX. The guest bath, with a basic steel enamel tub and small vanity, had worked well for their lifestyle when their three boys were young.
But now their three soon to be teenage boys neeeded a practical and easy to clean shower of their own. And the basic builder grade bathroom needed work anyway, because bathtubs don’t last forever.
This steel enamel tub was pretty badly scratched and had a leaky drain after 15 years of really hard use. Three boys will wear out a tub pretty quick. So here’s what they wanted for their budget bathtub to walk-in shower conversion renovation:
The Goals
Each bathroom renovation project comes with a set of goals that can be contradictory. For example, it’s pretty hard to get a quality Ferrari sportscar on a used Kia budget. But you can at least maximize your budget by being real clear about what your major goals are. That’s how you can make some smart cost vs benefit decisions.
AFFORDABILITY: Every client wants to save some money. Smart clients know where NOT to skimp. These clients knew better than to skim on install labor. So instead, they saved money on the tile.
Tile is usually the largest single material expense for any full bath reno project. And while cheap labor can make expensive tile look really bad, expert installation can make even cheap tile look expensive. That’s why the clients chose large-format porcelain veneer tile from Floor&Decor for less than $3/ft2.
PRACTICALITY: Remember that THREE teenage boys will use this shower. It will need to be easy to clean. That’s why the clients smartly chose high-gloss greyish tile with a faux-stone color pattern. Smooth glossy finish tile will shed soap residue, and grey will hide what residue does accumulate.
The clients also designed smartly. The large format 12×24 tile fit the 5-ft by 10-ft space perfectly. This minimized overage (keeping tile cost to a minimum) and also allowed for really tight 1/16-in grout lines. Choosing a neutral light grey grout color helped even more to make this a really low maintenance tile shower.
USABILITY: Shower width is a usability problem when converting a tub to a shower in a standard 5×8 guest bathroom. Standard builder-grade bathtubs are 29-in wide. The standard width for a walk-in shower is 36-in. That 7-in width difference can be a big deal if you want a glass enclosure for your new shower.
It’s not terribly annoying to bump into a bathtub shower curtain. It can, however, be real claustrophobic to feel boxed in by a narrow glass enclosure.
It takes some creativity to mittigate this problem. You can’t make a shower arbitrarily wide when converting a tub to a shower in a small bathroom on a concrete foundation. Toilets require some clearance for usability. Putting a 36-in wide shower where a 29-in wide tub used to be can make your toilet uncomfortable to use, just like a too narrow shower.
These clients needed their shower to be wide as possible. Their boys were growing fast. Read on for tips on the creative shower curb hack we used to make the new shower a full 32-in wide from glass to wall.
Step ZERO: Demo
Every bath remodel project starts with at least some demo work. Usually I would recommend a full to the studs demo for a tub to shower renovation, including all the drywall. Taking everything to the studs makes it easy to add outlets and other electrical fixtures without having to texture match a bunch of drywall holes.
But I was very conservative on this bathroom renovation demo, as you can see. This bathroom had a large easily accessible attic space above. And the clients didn’t need to move any of the outlet or switch locations. The clients also smartly found a new vanity cabinet that didn’t require moving the sink plumbing hookups.
COST SAVINGS TIP: You can eliminate drywall work with creative design and careful fixtures shopping. This can cut $1k or more from your overall bath renovation project cost.
Step ONE: Re-Plumb
Every proper tub to shower conversion requires a complete drain replumbing. Bathtubs are plumbed with a 1-1/2 inch drain pipe. Showers require a 2-in drain pipe. Connecting a 2-in drain to a 1-1/2 inch pipe is a SERIOUS code violation. Therefore, the first step for converting a tub to a shower is digging down to where the tub drain widens out into a 2-in diameter pipe. This requires some jackhammering through the concrete foundation slab.
The good news? I have lots of experience with carefully hammering through concrete foundation slabs. Also, all the water and gas pipes in this house ran through the attic and not the foundation. So there was no risk of popping a pipe. This was also a modern build house, so all the drain plumbing was modern PVC. Old midcentury homes with legacy cast iron drain pipes are much more difficult to replumb, since old cast iron is very brittle and therefore difficult to cut cleanly. And finally, conscientious new home builders use 2-in p-trap piping even for bathtubs.
So the only difficulty on this replumbing job was the super-thick foundation. I spent almost a full day jackhammering a trench through this 16-in thick foundation slab. But the actual drain replubing was easy once all of the trenching was done. The last replumbing task was backfilling the excavation with tightly packed pea gravel and sand, and patching the slab with high-strength concrete mix.
COST SAVINGS TIP: Do not skimp on proper plumbing. You really want to properly replumb for a code-compliant tub to shower conversion renovation on a concrete slab foundation. Trying to cut corners by plumbing a 2-in drain into a 1-1/2in pipe risks having to tear everything apart to properly redo the plumbing from scratch later.
Step TWO: Make the Shower
I’ve already detailed how to slope a shower floor with deckmud, and how to waterproof a tile shower using Kerdi waterproofing for the shower base and RedGard waterproofing for the shower walls.
Key for this project was maximizing the width of the new shower. A standard shower curb is 5-6in wide. This isn’t a requirement, just a result of how shower curbs are typically constructed. The easiest method is to just use 2×4 lumber to start the curb. But there’s no reason to do it this way aside from lazy convenience.
Step 2.5: Make the Shower WIDE!
Here’s how you can add up to 6in to the usable width of your new shower when converting a tub to a shower.
FIRST, rip the 2x4s that form the core of the curb almost in half. The curb width will now start at just 2-in.
SECOND, use thin 1/4-in concrete backerboard to cover the inside of the curb (Kerdi installs with thinset, so it needs backerboard to adhere to). Then, skip wrapping the outside face of the shower curb (it’s outside the wet area, so no need to waterproof the outside face).
THIRD, go ahead and crowd the toilet by a couple inches. Strict code compliance calls for a full 15-in clearance from the center of the toilet to any vanity or wall or glass partition on either side.
Practically though, you can get away with shrinking the clearance a bit on one side of a toilet. It’ll be a choice, but you can make this choice consciously by simply mocking up a cardboard panel to experiment for yourself. These folks chose to go with 13-in of clearance from the center of the toilet drain to the center of the new shower curb.
USABILITY TIP: Steal every inch practically possible when converting a tub to a shower. I was able to make a skinny 3.5-in finished width curb. And, the clients decided that crowding the toilet by 2-in wouldn’t be a problem (all their boys were skinny). This made for a 32-in final finished shower width, which is actually a lot more elbow room than 28-in.
PRO TIP: You can mock up different shower width options with a shower rod and curtain. For example, if you’re thinking of ‘stealing’ some space by making the shower curb closer than 15-in from the center of the toilet. First, hang a shower curtain along where the center of the new shower curb would be. Then, sit on the toilet. If the space now feels uncomfortably tight, then you know to NOT try widening the shower that far.
Step THREE: Tile and Grout
These folks made great design decisions, so tiling the shower on this project was a real pleasure. Usually it takes a lot of time and patience to figure out the best way to match random size tile to a fixed renovation space. These clients made layout easy by managing the design challenge like professionals. They made the tile dimensions perfectly match the existing space.
See how the 12×24 wall tile exactly fits the space with zero overage? Same with the large format 30×30 porcelain bathroom floor tile. The clients made really smart tile material and design choices to minimize material cost, minimize grout lines, and to maximize calm along with easy cleaning.
I was able to also perfectly center the shower floor penny tile around both the drain and shower perimeter to make every bit of the tile install balanced and even.
The hard porcelain veneer materials, polished tile surfaces, and dense presealed grout finishes in this shower will make it super easy to keep clean even with three boys using it six times a day.
DESIGN & USABILITY TIPS: Make the tile size and pattern match the existing space, and pick materials that will be easy to clean! Future self will thank ya.
Step FOUR: Fixtures and Glass Finish
Remember the origional basic builder grade bathroom we started with? Here are the before pics:
These folks could have just replaced the scratched up leaky bathtub and tub surround on the cheap with the same builder grade materials (keeping the origional vanity, lighting, and floor tile intact). However, even just replacing a bathtub is more expensive than you might think when it also requires redoing plumbing, ripping out and replacing a tile surround, etc. They would have still had the same cramped tub/shower combo, outdated floor tile and vanity, and dark lighting.
Instead, these folks decided to spend about double to completely redo the space with a custom walk-in shower, added bright (and dimmable) lighting, and far more usable and easy to keep clean fixtures and tile surfaces.
Final Tips and Advice
It takes smart design and careful shopping to get this much bang for your buck when converting a tub to a shower. And paying extra for extra usability and added home value might not make sense for everyone. But this project shows that (opens in new tab) bathtub to shower full bathroom renovations don’t have to cost a fortune. You can make a project like this happen (even on a first floor concrete slab) for about the price of the cheapest new car you could buy in 2024.
Just to put things into perspective. Thanks for reading, and hope this post helped ya!