A San Diego master bathroom with a freestanding tub, a separate tiled shower, and cabinetry built for the room rather than bought to fit it.
Separating the tub and the shower
A master bathroom is the one room in a house where a tub and a shower can stop sharing a space, and doing so changes both of them.
A tub-shower combination compromises each. The tub is shallow enough to stand in, the shower is bounded by the tub's width, and the whole thing needs a curtain or a screen. Separating them lets the shower be sized for a person standing and the tub be sized for a person lying down.
The freestanding tub
Standing clear of the walls, with floor running underneath and around it.
The planning that requires is worth stating plainly. Supply and drain come up through the floor at exact points, located and set before the subfloor closes and the tile goes down — there is no moving them afterwards without opening the finished floor. The framing beneath has to be checked for the load of a filled tub, which is substantially more than an empty one.
What it buys is that the tub reads as a piece of furniture in the room rather than as plumbing built into a wall.
Custom cabinet vanities
Vanities, plural, built for the walls they sit on.
Master bathrooms are where stock cabinetry falls furthest short, because the runs are longest. A long vanity assembled from stock widths ends with filler panels at one or both ends, and those fillers are the first thing a careful eye lands on. Built to the wall, the run goes end to end with nothing making up the difference.
Tile shower walls and flooring
Tile on the shower walls over new waterproofing, and new tile across the whole floor so the tub, the shower and the vanities all sit on one continuous surface.
In a room with three separate zones, a single unbroken floor is the thing that keeps it reading as one room rather than three areas that happen to adjoin.
The result
A master bathroom with a genuine separation between bathing and showering, and cabinetry that fits the walls exactly — finished in two weeks.
