Master Bath Remodel

When we bought our house in 2005 every part of it was updated with the exception of the master bath. It has ugly plastic sliding doors, shower head that we had to duck under to get our hair wet and 1960's white tile floor. The house also did not have a bathroom accesable to the pool which required people to walk through the whole house on our new wood floors to get to the bathroom. A remodel was required.

First thing we did was select what kind of bathroom fixtures we wanted. The Wife wanted a large rain shower head and I wanted body jets. As often shower together we decided to put in two seprate sets of water controls. We decided on Hansgrohe THERMOBALANCE III metro for in brushed nickel for our shower. The cost was about $1300 for two hand sprays, 6 body jets, 1 regular shower head, and 1 12" shower head. The Thermobalance III is a combined mixer and diverter, so a single handle controls both temperature and which of the 3 water options are on. http://www.hansgroheinstock.com We hired a pluber to come in and run all the water lines for us.

We knew that we wanted a glass steam shower and looked for vanities with glass tops. We found one on Costco's website with a black wood finish base and single hole faucet for $800 including shipping.

Now the hard part, what tile do we put in. After looking at many places we elected a Noce Travertine 6x6 tile for the floors and the shower. We initially bough some at Lowes for $4.99 a tile. After later looking for the same tile we found it for $4.99 a foot 1/4 the price of Lowes at a local tile store. My initial plan was to tile the bathroom myself, but after seeing the job that the tile crew did on the granite top for our BBQ we elected to have them tile the shower and floor in the bathroom. I ordered a floor heating unit on ebay and provided it to them to install. They had never done one but they followed the instructions for laying it under the tile. I installed the electrial control box for the floor to control the times that the floor was heated. When they finished with the install of the tiles the crew did way beeter of a job than I expected. The pattern they did was wonderful.

With the tile up and plumbing installed all that was left was to install a door. After doing some research we dediced to order a door from eshowerdoor.com to finish off our bathroom. While looking around on their site we decided that we also wanted to replace our secondary bathroom shower curtin with a unique glass door.

I am quite handy and have done lots of work on our house myself so I decided that installing some glass should fall within what I can handle. I looked through their howto info and it seemed that installing the glass would be no problem for me.

My wife looked through their site and decided that we wanted a Steam Shower 2 (2ASTs). I clicked through and filled in my sizes, The door could not be witer than 28 inches or it whould hit the toilet when it swings out. I filled out the steam page at eshowerdoor.com and came up with a price of just under $1500 for the door. I contacted ehsowerdoor.com to place my order. I spoke with Max and he faxed me a full set of measurements for me to confirm. I checked all the numbers and told him that everything was good.

For the secondary door we selected to do an Erratic Edge door because it was unique and I had never seen it before. This door was much easier to measure because the height did not matter, just the width and the door size. I sent those numbers to Max and he gave me a quote of just over $1500 for frosted doors with vertical lines to match the wanes coating on our walls.

After placing the order with eshowerdoor.com our glass arrived via freight in less than three weeks. Both doors were enclosed in a single box with everything needed to install them. Items in the package Glass Hinges U-chanel aluminum silacone door scraper gap filler plastic

Now comes the hard part, each peice of glass weighed around 50 pounds. I had to get someone to help me install them as are large and heavy and beyond what my wife was comfortable helping me install the doors. Using the instructions provied on the eshowerdoor.com site I was able to do the installs without much trouble. I started with the secondary bath because it only required two peices of glass and did not require a u-chanel on the top. I mounted the vertical u-chanel first, using a level I mounted it with three screws and mollys. With this in place I mounted the horozantal one, this one was a bit more difficult because of the inward slant of the tub. I used two of the thin plastic glass levelers that were provided and cut them into small parts. I used the silicone to stick them just under the inside of the u-channel so that it sat level and meshed perfectly with the previously installed piece.