Tub or Shower:
choosing one.

Stand in your master bath and look at the wall the tub sits against. In most houses built here in the eighties and nineties, that wall is sixty inches long, and sixty inches holds one alcove tub or one real shower. Fitting both means shrinking both, and a cramped tub next to a cramped shower serves nobody.

The framing makes that decision for you. What is left is choosing which one you want.

The resale question, answered straight

This comes up before anything else, so take it first. A house with no tub anywhere is harder to sell to a family with small children. That is a real effect and we will not talk you out of it.

The effect disappears the moment there is a second tub in the house. If the hall bath has a tub, the master can lose its own and nothing happens to your value. Most Manchester and Tullahoma houses from that era have that layout, which is why the conversion is the most common job we run.

Keep the tub when

• You bathe small children now, and the hall bath has no tub or the hall bath is where guests go
• You soak. Some people use a tub two or three times a week and know it. If that is you, a shower is a downgrade no matter how nice the tile
• The house has one full bathroom and you plan to sell inside two years

Convert when

• The tub has gone unfilled for a year or more, and you already shower standing in it every day
• Stepping over the wall has started to matter. A fourteen-inch tub wall is a real obstacle at seventy that was invisible at forty, and a curbless pan removes it without making the room look medical
• You want the square footage to read as a bathroom instead of a bathtub. A sixty-inch shower with a bench and a niche changes how the whole room feels in a way a new tub never does
• The hall bath already covers the tub requirement

Inside the conversion

The tub and surround come out on day one along with the old backer board, and we haul it. Then the part that decides whether the job lasts: framing corrected, drain reset, waterproofing over the pan and up the walls, flood test.

Tile goes on after that passes. Most conversions run five days from demo to walk-through. The full sequence is on our tub-to-shower conversion page.

One decision we push people to make early: if there is any chance you will want grab bars later, tell us at the quote. Blocking goes into the wall on day two for nothing. Adding it in three years means opening the tile.