Bathroom Remodeling in Montrose, TX

The original bathroom in a Montrose cottage is often a tub against the back wall with a toilet and a small sink beside it, and the footprint has not changed since the house was built. Replacing the tub with a walk-in shower is the most common request, and in that footprint it is the right move for most households: a tub-sized shower with a glass panel makes the room feel twice as large, and it drops the step-over that older knees notice. The trade-off is resale. A house with one bathroom and no tub is a harder sell to a family with small children, so we ask how long you plan to stay.

Townhomes usually have the space to do both, with a freestanding tub and a separate shower in the primary bath, and there the decision is about proportion rather than square footage. A tub that fills the room and a shower that barely fits a person is a common builder layout we redraw. In either type of house, the shower valve, the drain location, and the niche for shampoo get placed on the drawing before the tile is chosen, because moving any of them after the waterproofing goes up means starting over. We bring the plan to the house and tape the layout on the floor so you can stand in it.

Tile is not waterproof and grout is not either. What keeps water out of the framing behind a Montrose shower is a membrane system under the tile: a sloped pan with a liner or a bonded sheet membrane, waterproofed walls, and sealed corners and pipe penetrations. In a 1930s house where the original bath was probably a tub surround over plaster, the wood behind it has often been damp for decades, and we replace any framing that has softened before the new membrane goes on. Skipping that step means tiling over a problem that will come back through the grout lines within a few years.

The tile itself is a design decision layered on top of a technical one. Small-format hex and subway tile suit the prewar houses and forgive the slightly out-of-square walls common in old framing; large-format porcelain suits a townhome and demands flatter walls, so we plan the substrate for it. Floors get a tile with real slip resistance when wet. We flood-test the shower pan before any tile is set, and the City of Houston inspection of the rough plumbing and the pan happens at that stage, so the waterproofing is verified before it disappears behind the finish.

Bathrooms in older Montrose houses were built with a window for ventilation and nothing else, and many of them still have no exhaust fan at all. In Houston's humidity a shower without mechanical exhaust leaves the room damp for hours, which is how paint peels, grout darkens, and mildew takes hold in a corner that never fully dries. Every bathroom we remodel gets a properly sized exhaust fan ducted to the outside, not into the attic, and on a prewar house that duct route usually goes through the attic and out the roof or a gable end where it will not stain the siding.

The fan is only useful if it runs long enough, so we wire it to a timer or a humidity sensor rather than to the light switch that gets flipped off the moment someone leaves. A townhome bath on an interior wall has the same problem with a longer duct run, and we size the fan for that run. The window in a cottage bath is worth keeping for light, but it needs to be a unit that tolerates moisture, and the sill and trim below it should be a material that does not swell. Ventilation is inexpensive during a remodel and expensive to add afterward.

A lot of Montrose homeowners intend to stay in their bungalows for decades, and a bathroom remodel is the moment to build for that without making the room look like a hospital. A curbless shower entry, a bench, a hand shower on a slide bar, and blocking in the walls for future grab bars all disappear into a well-designed room. A comfort-height toilet and a vanity with a knee space at one end are the same kind of quiet choices. None of them add much cost while the walls are open, and all of them are expensive to retrofit later once the tile is set.

The curbless shower is the one that needs planning. The floor has to slope to a drain without a curb to hold the water back, which means the shower floor is recessed relative to the bathroom floor. On a pier and beam house we can drop the subfloor between joists to make that recess; on a slab townhome it requires a linear drain and careful slope in the tile bed. Doorways can be widened during framing when a wall is already open. If accessibility is part of your reason for remodeling, tell us during the design visit and we draw the room to it from the start.

Because a real bathroom remodel moves plumbing and electrical, permits run through the City of Houston, and the work is inspected at rough-in and again at final. The sequence is demolition, any framing repair, plumbing and electrical rough-ins, the rough inspection, waterproofing and the flood test, tile, then the vanity, fixtures, glass, and trim. Shower glass is measured after the tile is done and takes time to fabricate, which is the step that most often surprises people. We tell you the date the glass is ordered and the date it arrives, so the last week is not a mystery.

In a one-bathroom bungalow the practical question is where everyone showers for several weeks, and we plan the schedule around it: the toilet goes back in as early as the sequence allows, and we keep a working sink in the house at every stage. In a townhome with a second bath the disruption is mostly dust and traffic on the stairs, which we control with floor protection and a sealed door. Materials are ordered before demolition starts so the room is never open and waiting on a shipment, and the free itemized quote you approved is the document we build to.