Sometimes there is a better approach to installing disability baths to help people that find getting in and out of the bath difficult with age or arthritis.

Introduction

You may want to replace a bath as you (or someone close to you) can no longer easily get in and out of it.

However, you may not want to re-do the entire bathroom due to the extra costs involved.

(You should always work with what you’ve got to keep the budget down!)

Therefore, as I see it, you have 3 options:

disability bath

1. A specialist disability bathroom installer can supply & install a disability bath and this can rack up quite a bill.

Bath replaced by walk in shower

2. You may choose to install a walk in shower (often called a wetroom), which many people choose to do as it looks great and is completely level – meaning there are no trip hazards.

This makes wet rooms well suited for people with mobility issues or wheelchair users, or those just wanting a high end hotel type finish!

Please see here for more information.

3. You may choose to install a shower enclosure in place of the bath though with this approach you will (normally) have some re-tiling to do.

Bath to shower conversion, Leeds

Before

Bath to walk in shower

In this instance, we chose to replace the bath with a walk in shower & shower tray, leaving the existing wall tiles in situ.

Why?

As wall tiles stop at the bath rim, the area beneith the bath rim is almost always un-tiled:

removed bath

This means that extra tiling needs to be carried out to finish the tiles down onto the new shower tray.

Sourcing matching tiles is often impossible (if there are no spares) so the option then becomes:

  1. Strip & retile ALL the walls to guarantee a match
  2. Find a tile that is a suitable compromise to ‘tie in’ with the existing tiles

Option 1 is much more expensive as the costs involved spiral:

  • Labour for removing all tiles (approx 1 day)
  • Disposal costs for the old tiles e.g. a skip at £100+
  • Labour cost to remove basins, toilets & radiators that currently sit against the walls being stripped
  • Repairing the walls beneith the tiles when stripping them damages the walls
  • Tiling all of the walls (large area vs just below the bath rim as a comparison)
  • Reinstating the toilet, basin, radiator etc
  • Re-fitting any accessories to the rest of the bathroom – cupboards, loo roll holders etc

Plus, during this time (maybe 1 working week if you can line all your trades up correctly) you will probably be without any bathroom facilities.

To save costs & disruption, we chose to opt for option 2…….

old tiles are difficult to match

Here’s one of the existing tiles that were impossible to match as they had long been discontinued.

Low level walk in shower

Here you can see how we’ve managed to find a wall tile that is the same width as the existing tiles in a complimentary colour.

This (at least) keeps the vertical grout lines consistent, even though the new tiles were taller than the existing ones.

You can also see that we’ve fitted a new vinyl floor as the existing one finished at the edge of the bath.

We do all this and more as part of our turnkey bathroom installation service (see box below).

Bath to Shower Conversion

What we do

We install quality bathrooms from start to finish, with all the bits in between taken care of.

We’ve done hundreds of bathrooms, en suites, downstairs loos and wetrooms, and some of our recent customer comments can be found here.

We provide advice and guidance during a free site survey, and we have a blog with lots of articles that cover frequently asked questions and show you examples of our recent work (PS see below for related articles)

We install bathrooms (or bath to shower conversions etc) from start to finish, supplying all the necessary trades and project managing the whole process, so you don’t have to!

We work to detailed, itemised estimates with fixed costs, so you can budget properly without fear of unexpected skyrocketing prices.

Our focus is on doing a proper job for a fair price in a reasonable time – see here for more info or contact me for a quote.

Thanks for reading

Chris

Useful links:

Replacing A Bath With A Shower Replacing A Bath With A Shower
Bath replaced by walk in showerMaking Bathing Easier by Replacing a Bath with a Walk-in Shower
bathroom-installation-replacing-shower-enclosureThe Cheapest Way To Replace A Bath With A Shower
bathroom installation walk-in showerReplacing A Bath With A Walk In Shower
bathroom-installation-leeds-prior-renovation Making The Most Of  Your Existing Bathroom