Bathroom Remodeling in The Heights, TX

The original bath in an early-1900s Heights house was sized for a tub, a pedestal sink, and a toilet, and not much else. Pushing an exterior wall out is expensive and, on a street-facing side of a historic-district block, brings review. So the better move is almost always to reorganize within the walls: turn the tub into a walk-in shower along the short wall, hang a wall-mounted vanity so the floor reads larger, recess the medicine cabinet and a niche into the stud bay, and steal a foot from an adjacent closet if the framing allows it.

That last option matters in bungalow plans, where a hall closet or the back of a bedroom closet often shares a wall with the bath. Borrowing that space is interior work with no exterior change, so it stays under a standard City of Houston permit. We draw the room at full scale, including door swing, because a pocket door in place of a hinged one frees more floor than any fixture change. In newer Heights construction the bath is usually larger and the problem is the opposite: builder-grade fixtures spread across a room that wants a better plan rather than a bigger one.

Plenty of Heights bungalows still have a single full bath, and that changes the shower-versus-tub decision. If it is the only bath, removing the tub means the house has none, which matters for young kids and for resale. In that case we often keep a tub in the hall bath and put the walk-in shower in a new second bath carved from a porch enclosure or closet. If the house already has two baths, or you are building a primary suite in an addition, the primary gets the walk-in shower and the tub question goes away.

When a walk-in shower is the answer, the choice is between a curbed shower with a glass panel and a curbless entry that runs the floor tile straight in. Curbless takes more planning on a pier-and-beam floor because the drain has to sit lower than the surrounding subfloor, but the crawlspace under a bungalow makes that framing change feasible in a way a slab house cannot easily match. It also sets the bath up for aging in place without looking like a medical room. We show both on the drawing and price them side by side.

A century-old pier-and-beam house flexes. Seasons of wet and dry clay shift the piers a little, doors stick and unstick, and a tile shower built without a proper membrane cracks at the grout lines and lets water into the framing. The fix is a bonded waterproofing membrane over a shower pan and walls that are built as a continuous system, with the membrane carried up the walls and over the curb, and a pan that slopes to the drain before the tile ever goes on. Tile is the finish, not the waterproofing, and we build every shower that way.

Under that membrane, the subfloor has to be sound and stiff. We check joist spacing and condition from the crawlspace, sister or replace what is soft near the old tub, and add blocking so the floor does not deflect under the shower pan. Where the house is newer and on a slab, the floor is stable but the drain location is fixed in concrete, and moving it means cutting the slab, which we price and schedule as its own step. In both cases we flood-test the pan before tile so any leak shows up while it is still cheap to fix.

Gulf Coast humidity means a bathroom that never quite dries, and in an old Heights house the original vent, if there is one, often dumps into the attic or nowhere at all. That is how mildew gets behind paint and into ceiling plaster. We install an exhaust fan sized for the room, duct it to a roof or wall cap rather than into the attic, and put it on a timer or humidity sensor so it runs long enough after a shower to matter. The duct route through a hip roof or a low attic is worked out on the drawings, not discovered later.

The finishes follow the same logic. Paint rated for moisture, a tile floor rather than wood in the wet zone, and a vanity built from materials that will not swell when the bath stays damp for a week of summer rain. Windows in these old baths are often original wood sash, and we keep them where possible, refit them so they open, and protect the sill with a stone or tile cap. A bath that dries out between uses lasts decades longer than one that does not, and in this climate the fan is the single most important fixture in the room.

Storage in a small bungalow bath comes from the walls, not the floor. We recess a medicine cabinet into the stud bay over the sink, build a tall niche beside the shower for towels, and specify a vanity with drawers rather than a door and a single shelf. A wall-hung vanity leaves the floor visible under it, which reads larger in a narrow room, and it keeps the plumbing accessible from below. Where the room is a real closet-sized space, a corner sink or a trough sink along the long wall can free the door swing.

Lighting in these baths was usually one ceiling fixture and, at most, a bar over the mirror. We split it into layers: sconces or a vertical fixture flanking the mirror at face height, a ceiling fixture on a dimmer, and a small light in the shower on its own rated circuit. Everything runs on new wire to the panel, because the existing circuit is often shared with a bedroom and does not have the protection a wet room requires. In newer Heights homes the wiring is sound and the work is mostly swapping builder fixtures for ones chosen for the room.