Four bathrooms in a Pacific Beach house, done as one project over eight weeks, tied together by a single coastal direction.
Carrying one theme across four rooms
Bathrooms in the same house are usually remodelled years apart, and it shows — each one reflects whatever was current when it was done, and the house reads as a sequence of decisions rather than a single one.
Doing four at once removes that. One material direction runs through all of them, so the master, the guest baths and the smallest room in the house all belong to the same building.
Coastal was the right direction here for the obvious reason: the house is a few blocks from the sand. A theme that answers where a house actually is tends to age considerably better than one imported from somewhere else.
The master: shower and freestanding tub
Both, in separate places.
The freestanding tub stands clear of the walls, so the supply and drain come up through the floor at exact points, set before the subfloor closed and the tile went down. The framing beneath was verified for the load of a filled tub.
Having both means neither compromises. A tub-shower combination gives you a shallow tub and a narrow shower; separating them lets the shower be sized for standing and the tub for lying down.
Prefabricated vanities, and one custom
Three of the four bathrooms have prefabricated vanities. One is custom.
That split is deliberate and it is how a four-bathroom project stays sensible. Prefabricated vanities are entirely adequate where the wall is a standard length and the plumbing comes up where it is expected — which describes most secondary bathrooms.
Custom earns its place where the room is awkward, where the run is long, or where the vanity is the thing you look at when you walk in. Specifying custom in all four would have added time to three rooms that did not need it.
Tile floors and shower walls
Tile on the floors and on the shower walls in every bathroom, over new waterproofing in each.
Coastal houses give a specific reason to be careful here. Sand comes in on feet, salt air comes in through the windows, and the humidity is higher year round than it is inland. A bathroom floor a few blocks from the beach works harder than the same floor in Escondido.
Eight weeks for four bathrooms
Sequenced as one project rather than four: one demolition phase, one plumbing rough, one tile crew moving room to room, one inspection cycle. Doing them separately would have meant four of everything and a house repeatedly returned to as a job site.
The result
Four bathrooms that read as one house, finished in eight weeks.
