A full rebuild of the room in two weeks, built around one decision: the tub came out. It had been boxed in behind sliding glass doors long enough to have stopped sliding properly, and taking it out is the single change that does the most for a bathroom this size.
Why the tub went
A tub in a secondary bathroom is often storage for shampoo bottles. Stepping over a twenty inch wall every morning stops being charming quickly, and it is the thing that gets harder every year somebody stays in the house.
Pulling it out buys floor area that was always there and never usable. The shower is wider than the tub was long, the glass is clear rather than frosted, and the room reads twice the size from the doorway without a wall having moved.
The patterned wall
One wall of patterned tile, plain tile everywhere else. That restraint is the point: a pattern on every surface is noise, and a pattern on one wall is a decision.
It sits on the wall you face as you walk in, which is why the room has something to look at from the door. The niche is set into the plain tile beside it rather than cut through the pattern, so the pattern is never interrupted mid-motif.
Frameless glass
Frameless rather than a framed panel or a sliding door. There is no track on the floor to collect grime, no aluminium frame to corrode, and nothing crossing the glass to break the view of the tile.
It asks more of the build. The opening has to be plumb and square because the glass will not forgive it, and the panels are measured after the tile goes on rather than before.
The vanity and fittings
A new vanity in a soft blue against white, which picks up the blue in the tile without matching it exactly. Brushed nickel on the valves and the shower, warm enough against the white tile without the yellow of brass.
Both a fixed head and a handheld on a slide bar, because a handheld is what makes a shower easy to clean and easy for anybody who cannot stand comfortably for long.
The result
A tub nobody wanted replaced with a shower the whole house uses, in the same footprint, with one wall of pattern doing all the decorating. Two weeks from demolition to finish.
