In homes built before the 1980s, assume old flooring and mastic may contain asbestos until it has been tested.
Riverdale’s housing is mostly from the 1970s through the 1990s, which puts a whole generation of shower pans at or past the end of their service lives at roughly the same time. A shower pan built in that era — a hot-mopped bed or an early sheet liner under a mortar base — was good for several decades, and several decades is what has passed. The other thing we see a lot of here is conversion work: households that no longer want to step over a tub wall, wanting a walk-in shower in the same footprint. Both of those are jobs where the tile is the easy part.
A shower pan is a waterproof tray under the tile, and it fails from the edges inward. The liner at a corner gets brittle and cracks. The seal where the liner meets the drain assembly lets go. The curb, which is the hardest part of a pan to build correctly, starts letting water into the framing beneath it. None of that is visible, so the pan announces itself indirectly.
The signs worth taking seriously: a persistent musty smell in the bathroom, a floor tile just outside the shower that has started to move, a stain on a ceiling or a wall on the floor below, and grout at the base of the shower that is always damp long after the shower has been used. Any of those means water is going somewhere it was not meant to.
There is no partial repair for a failed pan. The tile has to come out, the substrate gets assessed for rot, and the pan is rebuilt — these days usually with a pre-sloped foam base and a bonded waterproofing membrane, which is faster to build and less dependent on one person’s skill with a mortar bed. What matters is that the system is installed as a system, with the corners, the curb and the drain detailed the way the manufacturer requires.
Replacing a tub with a shower sounds like a straight substitution and it is not. A tub holds its own water; a shower depends on a pan and a membrane to do it. The footprint may be the same but the assembly behind the tile is completely different, and so is the drain — a tub drain sits at one end and a shower drain generally needs to be more central, which means work on the drain line below the floor.
In a house with a basement below, access to that drain line is usually straightforward. In a house on a slab it is a very different proposition, and it is worth establishing which situation you are in before planning the project, because it is the single biggest variable in the cost.
The other conversion detail is water containment without a tub wall. Showers in a tub footprint are narrow, so splash and spray reach further than people expect. A properly sized curb or a low threshold, a glass panel rather than a curtain, and waterproofing carried beyond the obvious wet area are what keep the new shower from wetting the room.
A curbless shower is increasingly requested, often for accessibility, and it is the least forgiving shower to build. Without a curb, nothing but slope and waterproofing keeps the water inside, which means the slope has to be correct across the whole entry area and the membrane has to extend well out into the bathroom floor.
Structurally it usually requires recessing the shower floor below the surrounding floor level, which in a wood-framed house means working within the joists. That is achievable and it needs planning rather than improvisation — notching or altering joists without regard for how they carry load is not something to do by eye.
Where accessibility is the real goal, it is worth designing for it properly rather than partially: entry width, where the controls sit so they can be reached from outside the spray, solid blocking in the walls for grab bars whether or not they go in now, and a bench if the space allows. Doing the blocking during the build costs very little and is expensive to add later.
Often a shower pan that has failed. Pans from the 1970s through the 1990s are at the end of their service lives, and they fail invisibly — at the liner corners, at the drain connection, or through the curb. Other signs are a floor tile just outside the shower starting to move, a stain on the ceiling below, and grout at the base of the shower that stays damp. There is no partial repair; the pan gets rebuilt.
No. A tub holds its own water; a shower needs a pan and a membrane to do it, so the assembly behind the tile is entirely different. The drain also has to move, since a tub drain sits at one end and a shower drain usually needs to be more central. Whether you have a basement below or a slab is the biggest single variable in what that costs, so establish that first.
It is a good idea done properly and a reliable leak done casually, because without a curb only slope and waterproofing keep water in. It normally means recessing the shower floor within the joists, which needs planning rather than notching by eye. If accessibility is the goal, also do the entry width, reachable controls and solid wall blocking for grab bars during the build — blocking is cheap now and expensive later.
Describe the job and we'll match you with an installer who builds the assembly in the right order.
Get a Tile InstallerA rough description is plenty — we will follow up to scope the details and set a time.
