How do you convert a walk-in shower to a tub?

Sources

Master Bathroom Renovation - Converting a Bathtub into a Walk In ...

ourhandcraftedlife

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Converting a shower back to a bathtub? : r/HomeImprovement - Reddit

reddit

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Tub Insert Convertible Shower - Clarion Bathware

clarionbathware

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3

Answer

Converting a walk-in shower to a bathtub involves several steps:

Demolition

1. Remove the existing shower base, walls, and any tile or other materials covering the area.1
2. Ensure the space is large enough to accommodate a standard bathtub size (around 60" x 32").1

Preparation

3. Install new plumbing lines and a bathtub drain at the appropriate location if needed.5
4. Build a moisture-resistant base for the bathtub, typically using mortar or a tub liner.5

Installation

5. Carefully move the new bathtub into position and secure it to the base.5
6. Install waterproof backer boards or cement boards on the walls surrounding the tub area.1
7. Tile the walls and add any desired accessories like grab bars or shower curtains.14

Finishing Touches

8. Caulk and grout all seams for a watertight seal.14
9. Install the tub faucet, showerhead, and other fixtures.4

The total cost can range from $1,000 to $3,000 for a DIY project, depending on materials and complexity. Hiring a professional contractor will increase the cost further.15 Proper waterproofing and sloping the floor towards the drain is crucial to prevent leaks.5

Video Full Text

• 00:00 Oh hey. I didn't see you there hi. I'm oh hey there. This is mike family diy tv today. I want to show you how to build this beautiful bathtub shower okay. This was a shower stall with shower doors uh the wife didn't like that she hated it ever since we moved in. It didn't bother me which it really bothered her. She would not leave me alone about it. So we decided we're gonna gut everything and we're gonna put in a new tub new tile and all new plumbing hardware because as you know a shower has the drain in the middle we need to move it to the end okay. A shower also doesn't have a spout for the water to fill the tub because there's no top because it's a shower all right. We also have to move a lot of this other plumbing so we're going to show you that whole process um we're going to give you a lot of tips. This isn't going to be a detailed how to but we're going to clip away. A couple times do some time lapse and show you and give you a couple tips as we go through it okay. So. I think you will definitely gain a lot out of watching this video if you're thinking about doing your bathroom. If you're thinking about doing it yourself or you're thinking about hiring someone. At least you can watch this video and see what does it entail to do a project like this to redo a bathroom. Bathrooms and kitchens are the worst out of all of the house renovations you can do yourself um. I would say besides maybe a roof roof is definitely the worst I think but kitchens and bathrooms are terrible um. But they're not that they're not bad enough that you know if you wanted a nice bathroom that you know. I wouldn't do it. So you know. I would definitely do it. It's definitely worth it. It's really a temporary pain for a long-term gain okay so please subscribe please like and please sit down and get ready to watch this video. I appreciate you all right.

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• 02:14 So the first step of redoing a shower or a bathroom is a sledgehammer right where it's going to take this knob actually that's not it. It actually started about a month ago. Maybe two months ago actually started probably years ago. Me and a wife talked about this a lot um going over what exactly we wanted um the way. I like to plan. My projects is I like to say kind of pie in the sky. How much money imagine money was not an issue. What would you want all right and you know you may think of a lot of crazy things that maybe you can't afford. But you may work to a more reasonable thing that you can afford okay so um or you may go. You know what uh this is exactly what. I want. But I can't afford it right now so maybe. I'll push it out six months or whatever so you know basically my point is you want to do. This start this process with planning you don't just jump in and rip stuff out. That's the fun part really. The planning is really where you want to spend a lot of your time okay so like with the shower. For example uh you know we need to think about you know what's this going to look like when it's done okay. So it's going to be tile all right how how we're going to attach the tile to the wall okay. The wall what are we attaching to is that the is a thin set and the wall that we're attaching to is that compatible okay. The waterproofing is that compatible with the thinset is that compatible with the tile okay. So all this stuff you have to do all this research ahead of time uh before you take a hammer to anything okay and that'll make your project go a lot faster and actually make a lot less stressful because you won't run into all. These uh surprises you're gonna run a new surprise. You want to keep them admittable all right so first thing. We're going to do actually in the shower. We're going to just take this all apart remove. It all get it out of here get down to studs and then we're going to build it all back and I'm going to show you how to do that um so all right so just a quick update. So everything has been pulled down right um. We've cleaned everything um. Unfortunately we did find it's fortunate and unfortunate. Uh this is actually old rot um or mold or whatever you want to call it. It was old um and we know that because first of all the insulation has all been replaced. So this was an old been here for about 10 years. In this condition we did do a moisture meter reading all came back dry but just to be careful uh just as a double double insurance. We did this mold armor stuff sprayed it all down so it actually looks a lot worse than it did initially especially down. There. It's like bleached so it looks worse but um but yeah that's it so now.

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• 05:42 What we're going to do is actually we're going to bring the tub up and we're going to set it in place. Dry fit it um to see where our our drain is gonna be okay. So we're gonna set it in place mark it and then we can pull this all pull the tub back out and then start putting our drain together. All right that'll be the next step all right. So now now we're at the um. The drain installation part okay of the top. So here's the tub. It's in here now um so the way I usually do. It is. I put the the plumbing on the tub okay so you can see that this is installed. I glue this contraption all together. This is where the overflow pipe will go. We'll add that afterwards that'll be the last thing that we do so. We'll just leave this disconnected until after the top is set okay. Now. We're so now we're gonna worry about just this part. So this part what you do is once you install it and it's look. This is gonna be a little tough because everything's every house and every plumbing situation is gonna be a little bit different okay so what I did was um. I measured from the center of this to the center of that pipe which is about five inches okay. So we get five inches so let's remember that that's five inches. Before we did anything we actually dry fitted the tub and we put a mark on exactly where the tub was going to exhaust. So this is where the if you were the tub was here. This is where the the water would go down okay but we need to account for all that additional plumbing there. So that's where the five inches comes into play so the plant the pipe that comes up actually needs to be here. It needs to be five inches in front of this one or whatever you want to call it okay. So it's five inches apart. So that's why we made this little diagram. Then we cut it out okay. Then we use that diagram to say and we've just basically moved the numbers to here. So this is where the this is. The bath or this is the tub but this is actually where the plumbing is okay. So now we're basically just building everything back and what we're gonna. Do is we're going to install that piece as the the bathtub piece flush with the floor minus about an eighth of an inch okay. The idea is that if it's installed right here right where this is about an eighth inch below here when you go to install the piece from the top. You'll actually pull all the plumbing and make everything nice and tight okay. There is a little bit of play. In this. In this pvc. You know you'll see if you grab your pvc and move it. There's a little bit of play. So about an eighth of an inch is okay all right and that's how you can basically plumb these bathtubs without having to cut access holes and things like that okay. So you know that's how I'm doing this one um. It may or may not work for yours. But I just wanted to kind of walk through that I hope that made sense basically. We can't change this so that's why we start here. This is where the tub drain is going to be. Then we put all the drain all the stuff on the tub.

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• 09:09 We measure the distance five inches. That's where we get the five inches. We know that's where this needs to go down into the ground and then that's where we're going to build everything back. So. That's this is actually the trap. This is actually you can't see. The plumbing is back there but that's what it's going to be like just like that and then I'm going to take that one off and attach it here as as well and this will all be put together and I'll show you that once we get this all so we're plumbed up. So this is where the overflow will attach and this is where obviously the tub will attach. So these are those marks that we made all right. So we're dead center is right there. Now. What we're going to do is we're going to dry fit. The tub just make sure that this does line up and that we didn't do something crazy um. Then we'll take out the tub put our mortar bed down um and then reinstall the tub reinstall drain. Everything will be good all right. So the last time we talked. We were actually figuring out the drain since that time. We've got the drain set. We've got the tub set okay um. We really didn't run into any issues with the drain. Uh we had a little bit of an issue with the overflow okay. I actually miscalculated and uh we had to use a rubber coupling to join these two together uh because I cut the pvc too short. So I guess. The lesson learned. There is I mean you when I ran into the issue. I figured. I was going to cut everything out and like redo everything but you know I kind of took a little bit of a breath walked away came back and you know what this is just an overflow. A rubber coupling is definitely good enough for even if the water was running through it. So it's definitely good enough for air.

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• 12:13 The point is basically you know try to think a little bit outside the box um and you know usually a solution will come to you another thing whenever you're doing diy plumbing one thing that I do and I have started and I always do now is. I buy a lot of extra than what. I actually think. I need for the project. So if. I know I'm doing inch and a half plumbing and I'm connecting to a two inch line okay. I'm gonna buy enough to do it in two inch. I'm also gonna buy enough to do it in one inch and then I'm probably in in the one and a half inch. I'm gonna buy another four times the amount of stuff that I need honestly it sounds crazy. I leave the store with a ton of stuff. But you never know what you're going to get into okay same thing with the supply. I left the supply. I left home depot with two bags of fittings because I just didn't know exactly what I was going to get into and exactly how this was going. Gonna lay out. I actually bought three stub stub outs three different types. The one. I didn't think. I was going to use is actually the only one that would work because of my specific layout so just lesson learned just buy more than what you think you need especially. When you're doing plumbing you can return it all. I have a full bucket home depot bucket of all plumbing stuff that's going back so buy everything buy everything and then buy more believe me. It's better than going back and forth to the store 50 times okay. So once we got. We got this tub set. We got the drain in. We got the overflow in we then um. We then filled this thing up with water. We let the water go down no drain. No no floods no leaks. Then we moved on to our supply okay. So the only thing with the supply you really need to pay attention to honestly is the depth of it. You really need to con. That's the only thing you probably can mess up here in my opinion if you could do normal plumbing. Then you could do this but really the depth of the fixture is kind of the most complicated thing for me. At least um because you have to set this thing in the wall and then you have to tile over it. So you have to know exactly where this thing needs to be so just do a little bit of research before you do yours. There's a lot of videos. There's actually a guy that does like this on youtube and he does a great job. So I'm not going to sit here and show you how to exactly set this and where to set it but just think about that you know when you're going through the process watch. A bunch of videos on how to set the depth read the instructions that come with it and really make sure that you set this at the right depth because if you don't you're screwed um if you tile it then you have to go through the other side and if it's an exterior or even more screwed all right. So then once we got our supply in we then layered everything with plastic before we layered it with plastic.

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• 14:54 We pre-treated all the wood with a mold a mold killer even though it's it's very old stained wood. It's not really active mold that was there because it was all dry tested and moisture meter but just to be careful. We just sprayed it down with the mold mold killer. Then we put our vapor barrier slash. You know water barrier up okay. We had actually built this bench up. We had we're building this wall up a little bit um. The tub is set in concrete or in water actually not concrete mortar. You want to find water not concrete um and the tub is clipped in so now we're at the stage where we're actually going to um. We're actually going to take protector. We're actually going to take a tape and we're actually going to tape this seam to the to the wall okay. All the way around then we're gonna come back with cement board. We're gonna cement board over all of this and then we're gonna mesh tape. All the all the joints we're gonna thin set all the joints just like kind basically like your finished drywall um then on top of that. We're going to come back with a water proofing membrane. We got we got um. It's called aqua defense. You paint that on basically like a paint two coats. It's like really simple. No one can really mess it up then. Finally we can actually start tiling this bathroom okay and we'll we'll give an update through all of that and if we think of anything or anything comes up though you know would help a diyer. We'll let you know oh hey there. If you're still watching this video. I want to ask you a question can you please hit that subscribe button please hit that like button I really appreciate it thank you let me get back to my shower. All right so um. We're getting ready to put a hearty backer on one of the studs before. I did that I just wanted to quickly show you something that I've seen and I think it's a really good idea. Basically you buy this protecto wrap uh really. It's just it's just um any kind of type of flashing. It's a it's like a tape and you tape from half about half of the flange and then you just tape up okay and all this is doing really is just cause. It's stopping any water from going underneath and up if it was going to do that okay so we ran out all the way around um. We ran it on top of our bench here or our basically our shelf. This is just additional we're actually going to be doing hearty backer on top of this and then we're doing liquid waterproofing. So this is just a double double double double check um and we laid like shingles right. We laid it like shingles yeah. We started from the bottom and worked our way up so that if water does get there it will work. This work its way down and out okay um so that is it now. We're gonna get to lane hardy backer all right so now waterproofing. So all of the seams have been taped and bordered together okay so all the corners here all right. Now. We're going one extra step and we're adding waterproofing to the entire wall and especially all the corners and especially this little shelf over here all right next step. After that let it dry do two coats and start. We are at tile day okay so this is what we're currently working with um. It's green because we put waterproofing on it okay so basically the the process here was. We put our cement board on so we use hardy backer okay. We attach that directly to the studs okay um after we did the hardy backer. We went around just like you would do with spackling. Drywall is we use the grout that we're going to use to attach the tile to the wall. We use that same grout we actually filled in any big spots okay kind of pre-filled them anything that maybe you can stick maybe half of your pinky in um. If it's bigger than that.

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• 20:00 It shouldn't be that big but um but we filled in all the corners you know anywhere there's a corner we pre-filled. Then we went back with fiber tape so you can actually see it. I'm not sure if it comes through. But you can see actually there's a little bit of it. There like a fiber tape and we taped all the seams all the corners okay. Every seam has been fiber taped. Then we went back over that with a skim coat of the thin set that we're gonna use to set the tile let that dry for a day okay. Then we came back with the waterproofing okay and we covered the entire thing you'd see. It's green um. It's now p or whatever. I forget how to say the name but and then we coded basically you paint that on two coats and it makes it waterproof um. You really want to make sure you're getting all the corners and things like that okay. One thing to think about is the tile is really a decoration okay. It's not a waterproofer okay. So you want to be able to take a shower in this stall or whatever you want to call it before you put tile on so meaning. It's already been waterproof right so right now. I can actually take a shower in here and this won't leak at all okay. Once you can do that and think that in your head then you're ready for tile okay. If you can't shower in this stall with without the tile and it would stand it would leak. Then you're not ready okay. The tile is merely decoration. It's like brick on a house okay um. It's just there for really decoration. It's not structure. It's not waterproofing. It's nothing okay so again tile do not tile until this thing is completely waterproof everywhere okay. So now we're going to move on to the step of actually tiling this all right so that process started a few days ago with laying out. This tile different ways you can see. I have kind of a layout here now um. That's the kind of the hardest part is is kind of coming out trying to figure out what the pattern is going to be. Now. You could sit here for probably days and hours and hours and really beat your head over you know where do you want the lines to be do. You want a full tile here full tile there and I think it's a good thing to do but once it's stopping progression. Then you probably know if you've done enough analysis and you're ready to move forward and what I would say is if you have any other tile work in your house walk around look at the other tile work that you think is okay and start looking at the grout. Lines look at how close those grout lines maybe are to the wall. Maybe there you've never noticed that and you would not you wouldn't notice it here okay so you know use what you have in. Your house is maybe like a little bit of a guiding light and maybe that will help you make the decision on how critical do you have to be on where tiles line up and things like that okay. So. I'm gonna get on tiling. I'm gonna work on my bottom row getting that completely level completely perfect.

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• 22:57 Usually. I do that a day before. I do the rest of the wall. But I'm just running out of time. So. I'm gonna do it all today. But usually what I do is. I do that first row. I spend a few hours doing it and I make sure it's perfect level dead level and I let it set. I don't. I don't put any tiles on top of it. But I'm not going to have luxury this time. We'll do a time-lapse of the tile and then we'll kind of wrap this shower to bathtub oh let's go so foreign. So so here we are with the finalized product. What do you think um. I am very happy with it. I think it looks great uh. We really were worrying about that. This tile design we called a little bit too busy but you know what we decided we're just going to go for it with this one. We've always done a little bit of muted colors or maybe only would have added this in the past as as like as an accent tile. But this time we decided you know what we're gonna put the accent tile everywhere and we think it looks great. We went with um we like shower curtains. We don't like shower doors but you can see the um the hardware. Here we went that was like more of a brass uh oil rubbed. Bronze look um and we're very happy with it. It's super deep uh very comfortable for the wife that's really what the important thing was. We did this all for the wife. I I was finally before but she's happy so she's happy. I'm happy and we know we did a good job me and her did this ourselves. Everything gutted the entire place redid. Everything um you know even replace the bounty which we're not going to get into with this video. All the mirrors light fixtures everything the big thing was this um and new floors. This took us about four weeks okay so we worked on it every weekend um and then a little bit during the week here and there you know maybe doing a little bit of waterproofing or something like that. So this is something you could do in four weeks if you follow. These steps um and maybe think and also plan ahead a lot like I like. I explained earlier okay and if you could please like please subscribe please leave me a comment below. I appreciate you. I appreciate you and thank you we're out.

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