STEP BY STEP

What Actually Happens When We Convert Your Tub

Demo is the first day and it is more careful than people expect. A steel or acrylic tub comes out in one piece. A cast-iron tub, and there are plenty of them in older downtown Spearfish homes, often has to be scored and broken or cut into sections on site because it can weigh three hundred pounds and will not fit through a hall doorway intact. We protect the floors and walls along the whole path to the truck, pull the tub and the old surround, and get a clean look at the framing, the drain, and the subfloor before anything new goes in. Now and then that first look turns up water damage from years of a leaking tub, and it is far better to find it and fix it now than to tile over it.

Waterproofing is the part that decides whether the shower lasts. On a tile conversion we build a real system: a bonded sheet membrane or a liquid membrane over the backer board on the walls, and a properly sloped pan under the tile floor so every drop runs to the drain. On an acrylic conversion the manufacturer’s panels and a correctly sealed corner-and-seam system do the same job. Either way, water does not reach your studs. This is exactly where the cheap one-day outfits cut corners, and it is why their showers leak inside the wall a few years later. We do not.

The base is your first real choice. A pre-formed acrylic or solid-surface shower pan is fast, watertight from the factory, easy to clean, and the right call for most conversions. A tile floor on a mortar bed with a matched drain is the custom option: any tile you want, but more labor and cure time. Then comes the curb question. A standard low curb keeps water in and is the simplest build. A curbless, zero-threshold entry is the accessibility gold standard, letting you or a walker roll straight in with nothing to trip over, but it requires dropping or re-sloping the subfloor and a linear drain, so it adds cost and a day or two. On a slab Spearfish ranch that can mean recessing the slab; on a home over a crawlspace we drop the framing. We tell you honestly which one your bathroom can accept.

Grab-bar blocking is the upgrade we push on nearly every Spearfish conversion, because it costs almost nothing while the wall is open and it is expensive and ugly to add later. Before the surround goes on, we screw solid backing between the studs at seat height, at the entry, and beside the controls. Even if you do not want grab bars installed today, that hidden blocking means a bar can be mounted anywhere along those runs in ten minutes, into solid wood, whenever you need it. For anyone planning to age in this house, that one quiet step is the difference between a shower that supports you later and one that does not.

Timeline is the payoff. An acrylic conversion is usable again in one to two days from the first swing of the demo bar. A tile conversion runs one to two weeks because mortar and grout have to cure and the membrane has to be tested before tile goes on. Either way, Bruce does not start until every material is on site and the crew can run the job straight through, so your only bathroom is never sitting torn open waiting on a back-ordered part.