I have a tub, and have not taken a bath in a decade.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Thanks for all the replys. I am fairly new to this home-owning business and am still over-awed by the fact that I can actually drive a nail into the wall to hang a picture without getting into trouble, let alone knock down a whole wall to enlarge a room. I’m going to install shelves, too!
I suppose we’ll have to do some more research before we finally decide; we don’t use the bathtub we have now, but I do like the idea of having a nice big one that I can relax in with some bubbles and a good book. Do they even make bathtubs in that size?
Given that the boomers are just beginning to hit retirement age and that you have no plans to sell for quite some time, you may well indeed be better off with the walk-in shower for both you and resale value.
Personally, I would love to have a walk-in shower instead of my too-small-for-a-fat-woman tub/shower. The tub is too shallow to get a good soak going and even a PITA to just shower in without dancing with the shower curtain.
It may actually be dangerous for a senior citizen to have to climb inside a bath to shower every day. The risk of slipping and falling is not imaginary.
That said, a shower is more versatile then a bath. For instance, if you have kids visiting or need a tub to wash something large, you could always set up a fold-out bath in your shower space.
Here is a round fold-up bathtub for kids, that even saves water;
and here is a full lie down foldable bath.
The house I live in was also built in the '60s, and has two tiny bathrooms. The former owners (my late in-laws) removed the shower/tub combo from one bath and installed a tiled shower with a built in seat - much safer for my mother in law with bad hips and back. The other bath still has a tub.
My when-I-win-the-lottery-dream is to sacrifice one of the smaller bedrooms in order to expand both bathrooms and create a dressing room. Guess I’d better buy a ticket.
Along the lines of senior citizen safety… you can have safety and a mini-soak, too: Walk-in Bathtubs . I find these intriguing, and some look like they’d fit in smallish spaces. Just a thought.
Those look certainly interesting.
I grew up, not with a walk in tub, but with a sit bathtub, a much cheaper version of this one.
I liked it. Sitting in a bathtub is much more comfortable then laying down, it saves water, and you can have the biggest kid in the deep end and the smallest kid in the shallow end. And a sit tub fits on a smaller surface then a full tub. Besides, sit tubs are genreally higher, so a mom supervising the bath doesn’t have to bend over deeply.
Why don’t you expand the bathroom substantially instead of just adding 20"? I’m not sure what your floorplan looks like but it sounds like the extremely small bathroom is a pretty big nuisance and considering how important a room that is it might be worth sacrificing the computer room in order to make it more livable.
Your computer room (which I assume is your windowless 3rd bedroom) could probably stand to lose it’s closet and become an official den if it meant dramatically improving the status of the bathroom.
If you are going to remodel and move a wall, maybe you should think about going all the way instead of half-assing it.
My mother remodeled her bathroom, replacing the tub with an oversized shower. When she sold her house in the early 1990s, she was sorry. Several potential buyers just walked out when they saw that there was no bathtub. The real estate agent told my mom that she could probably have gotten $5000 more for the house if not for the shower-only bathroom.
That looks really cool - would there be any steps on the inside? I could envision having one of those in small house or in a vacation home - where space could potentially be at a premium. I’d build a very small, very nice platform about half-way up, as the site suggests. I like it.
At my mother’s house she had the tub pulled and had just a shower. However it was some sort of modular bathroom setup and when it came time to sell, we could, if the buyer wanted, have had a simple short wall put in to make it a tub.
Yes.
Bottom line, since you plan to live there for the rest of your life (or at least a couple decades) do what makes YOU happy.
another vote for going with what works for you. having a shower that is easy to get in and out of is rather important the older you get. so def. go for it, when you are 100 you’ll be a squeeky clean 100.