Should You Replace Your Bath With a Shower?

A bath waste sits low and uses a shallow trap because the bath itself provides the fall. A shower tray or wetroom floor needs its own trap positioned correctly beneath the floor level, with enough fall to the waste pipe to drain properly, typically a minimum gradient worked out from the tray's own outlet height.

In an upstairs bathroom this usually means lifting floorboards to access the joists and re-route the waste run, sometimes notching or drilling a joist within permitted limits to get the pipe low enough. On a solid concrete floor it can mean chasing out a channel or building the floor up slightly to hide the pipework, which affects the finished floor level and threshold.

Low profile trays need the shallowest possible waste, which is why we check ceiling clearance below (on upper floors) before quoting one, since some existing waste runs simply do not have the fall available without altering pipework further downstream.

A shower tray sits on the floor as a discrete unit with its own upstand and a sealed junction to the surrounding tiling. It is quicker to fit, easier to replace later, and suits most standard bathroom conversions.

A fully tanked floor, sometimes called a level access or wetroom-style floor, does away with the visible tray. The whole floor and a metre or so up the walls is waterproofed with a tanking membrane, then tiled flush, often with a slight fall built into a plywood or screed substrate towards a linear or point drain.

Tanked floors give a cleaner look and step-free access but need more structural work: usually lowering the joists locally or building up the surrounding floor, plus more careful attention to the waterproofing detail at every penetration and corner.

For most bath-to-shower conversions in a normal upstairs bathroom, a tray-based installation is the pragmatic choice. A tanked floor comes into its own on ground floor rooms or where a completely level, step-free shower is the priority.

Removing a bath leaves a footprint of missing tile, old adhesive and often a tide mark of silicone residue along the wall behind where the bath panel sat. Matching discontinued tiles exactly is rarely possible, so we talk through the options honestly at survey.

Where the existing tiling is otherwise sound, we can sometimes retile just the affected wall in a complementary tile or feature strip, provided the overall look is agreed upfront rather than discovered as a surprise.

Where the room is being retiled in full to accommodate a larger shower enclosure, we use a C2TE S1 flexible adhesive on plasterboard or cement board substrates and a CG2 waterproof grout in wet zones, which handles the movement and moisture around the new enclosure far better than older cement-based adhesives.

Behind the shower itself, tile backer board or a waterproof tanking membrane goes on before a single tile is laid, extending well beyond the spray zone rather than stopping neatly at the tray edge.

Removing the only bath in a house with more than one bathroom is usually fine, and often preferred by buyers who want a bigger shower rather than a bath they never use.

Removing the only bath in the property is the one scenario worth pausing on. Families with young children and some buyers specifically look for at least one bath in the house, so if yours is the sole bathroom we would flag this before you commit, even though it rarely stops a sale outright.

A well-executed shower conversion with good tiling and a quality enclosure tends to photograph and show better than a dated bath, which can help at viewing stage regardless of the bath-versus-shower debate.

The quote covers removal of the old bath, waste alterations, a new shower tray or tanked floor, the enclosure and making good the tiling. Floor access, drainage, waterproofing and how much tiling changes are the main variables, so a fixed price follows the free survey.