A shower-to-shower remodel in Encinitas — the shower stayed where it was, and everything in it came out and went back better.
What a shower-to-shower remodel actually involves
It sounds like the easy version, and in scheduling terms it is: the plumbing stays put, so no drain moves and no walls are opened beyond the wet area. What it is not is cosmetic.
The old shower comes out to the studs. Tile, backer board, pan, everything. What goes back in is a new waterproofing assembly — and that is the whole job. The stone on the wall is what you see; the membrane behind it is what determines whether this bathroom is still sound in fifteen years.
Most failed showers do not fail at the tile. They fail at the pan, at the curb, or at the corners where two planes meet, and by the time it shows on the ceiling below, the framing has been wet for a long time.
Quartzite in the shower
The shower walls here are quartzite slab rather than tile, sealed for use in a wet area.
Slab instead of tile changes the room considerably. A tiled wall has grout lines every few inches; a slab wall has two or three seams in the entire shower. The stone's own veining becomes the pattern, and there is far less to clean.
Natural stone in a shower does need to be sealed, and resealed periodically — quartzite is dense but it is not glass. That is the trade for the look, and homeowners should know it going in rather than discovering it later.
The rain head
The rain head is mounted in the ceiling, not on an arm off the wall.
That is a framing decision, not a fixture decision. The supply has to be run through the ceiling joists and the valve set before anything closes up, so it has to be planned before the walls go back. There is no adding a ceiling-mounted head to a finished shower without opening the ceiling.
Custom vanity
Built for the room rather than bought to fit it. Bathrooms are where stock cabinetry runs out of usefulness fastest — the wall lengths are odd, the plumbing comes up in a fixed spot, and a stock vanity that is two inches narrow leaves a gap that never stops looking like a gap.
The result
A bathroom that reads as a full rebuild despite nothing moving, finished in four weeks.
