Bathroom Remodeling in The Woodlands, TX

In a house from the 1980s in Grogan's Mill both bathrooms are usually original, and the budget rarely covers both at once. We generally suggest starting with the room that fails you daily. For most families that is the primary bath, where the sunken tub takes up the floor and the shower is a closet. For a household with three kids sharing one hall bath, it may be the hall bath, where a single vanity and a tub with a shower curtain create a morning bottleneck. A quick walk through both rooms with us usually settles it, because one of them has a problem the other does not.

Scope differs between the two more than people expect. A primary bath remodel here is often a layout job. Walls between the tub deck, the shower stall, and the closet come out, plumbing moves, and the room is rebuilt around a large shower. A hall bath is more often a rebuild in place. The tub stays where it is, the vanity gets replaced with a wider one, the tile and waterproofing are redone, and ventilation gets fixed. Both go through the county plumbing and electrical permits, but the hall bath usually needs no slab work, which is the single biggest difference in cost and duration.

The 1980s and 1990s primary baths across the villages almost all have a tub deck that nobody has filled in years. Most of our clients take it out and build a shower in its place. Before we do that, we ask whether any bathroom in the house will still have a tub. If the hall bath keeps one, the primary can go all shower without a second thought. If this is the only bathroom, or if you have toddlers or expect to sell to a family that does, we look at whether a freestanding tub fits in the recovered space next to the new shower. On many of the larger primary baths in Alden Bridge it does.

Once the tub deck comes out, the shower gets sized to the room rather than to the old stall. We favor a shower wide enough for a bench and a niche, a linear drain if the floor is being rebuilt anyway, and a glass panel instead of a door where the layout allows so there is one less thing to squeegee in a humid house. The shower head placement and the valve location follow the plumbing route under the slab, which is why the layout has to be settled before the plumber saw cuts. Changing your mind after the drain is set means cutting the slab twice.

Slab homes make up nearly all of The Woodlands, so moving a shower drain, a toilet, or a tub means opening the concrete. The plumber saw cuts the floor, trenches to the existing drain line, sets the new drain and vent, and calls the county for the rough inspection before the trench is filled. In the older villages this is when we also see how the original cast iron or early plastic drain line has aged, and replacing a short run while the floor is open is cheap compared with coming back later. The slab patch has to cure before the shower pan goes in, so this step sits at the start of the schedule.

Not every layout change requires slab work, and we try to design around it when the budget is tight. A toilet can often shift a few inches with an offset flange. A vanity can move along a wall without touching the floor because supply lines run through the wall and the drain can be extended inside the cabinet. The shower is the hard one. Its drain has to be at the low point of the new pan, and the pan has to sit where the shower is. If the shower moves, the slab opens. That is why we settle the shower location first and let everything else in the room follow.

Most families in The Woodlands are not remodeling to sell. They are remodeling to stay in a house on a lot they could not buy again, and the bathroom is the room that decides whether that plan works in twenty years. A curbless shower entry, a bench, a hand shower on a slide bar, and blocking in the walls for grab bars are all invisible when the room is finished and expensive to add later. We build them in as a matter of course unless you tell us not to. A slightly wider door and a comfort-height toilet fall in the same category.

The curbless entry is the one decision that has to be made before demolition, because it changes the slab work. The shower floor has to be recessed or the bathroom floor raised so the pan can slope to the drain without a curb, and on a slab that means a deeper cut. Done at rough-in it is a modest addition to the plumbing scope. Done as an afterthought it is a second remodel. If you are not sure, we can build the pan so the curb can be removed later, but we would rather have the conversation now, while the county drawings are being prepared.

A bathroom window in the township usually looks at a fence and a wall of trees, and a north-facing one gets almost no direct light at any time of year. We plan for that instead of hoping the window carries the room. Vanity lighting goes on both sides of the mirror at face height so there are no shadows, with an overhead fixture on a separate switch for cleaning and a low night light circuit for the middle of the night. Everything is on dimmers. A skylight or a solar tube is an option in single-story homes where the roof above is not under a limb that drops leaves on it.

Storage in an original bath is usually one vanity with a couple of doors and a medicine cabinet. We replace that with a vanity that uses drawers, a tall linen cabinet where the old tub deck freed up wall space, and a recessed niche in the shower for the bottles that otherwise live on the floor. Under a tree canopy the humidity inside a closed bathroom stays high, so the cabinet boxes and the finish on the vanity matter more than in a dry house. We specify materials that do not swell at the bottom edge, and we size the exhaust fan for the room and run it on a timer so it actually gets used.