Cherry Hills Village's
Trusted Team for Tub to Shower Conversions

What Actually Happens When We Pull The Tub Out

How Cherry Hills Village Tub to Shower Conversions Come Together

A lot of homeowners picture this project as a straight swap. Tub goes out, shower goes in, done by Friday. The reality has more moving parts than that, but it’s also not the months-long ordeal some people fear.

Here’s what a typical Cherry Hills Village tub to shower conversion involves once we get past the planning stage:

• Careful demolition of the existing tub, surround, and any tile or fiberglass that’s been sitting there since the house was built
• Inspection of the subfloor and wall framing, which in mid-century homes around the Village sometimes shows moisture damage nobody knew about
• Plumbing rework to move the drain, cap unused lines, and reposition the valve for a shower rather than a tub-shower combo
• New waterproofing across the pan and walls, done in layers rather than relying on a single membrane
• Setting the shower base, whether that’s a low-profile acrylic pan or a fully tiled curbless design
• Wall finishes, glass, fixtures, niches, benches, and the small details that turn the space from functional to genuinely nice to look at

The order matters, and so does the pace. Rushing waterproofing or setting tile on a subfloor that hasn’t been properly leveled is how you end up with a shower that leaks into the ceiling below within eighteen months. We’d rather add a day than skip a step.

Materials That Make Sense For The Later Around Here

Choosing Materials That Perform in Cherry Hills Village Bathrooms

Denver Water serves most of Cherry Hills Village, and while the supply is well-managed, it does carry enough mineral content that fixtures and glass show it over time. This matters more than people expect when picking out finishes.

Polished chrome and brushed nickel handle mineral spotting reasonably well. Matte black looks striking on day one but shows every water droplet by month three unless you’re the type of household that wipes down the shower daily. Some folks are. Most aren’t.

For glass, we usually recommend a protective coating baked onto the surface. It doesn’t eliminate cleaning, but it stretches the time between deep cleans considerably. Frameless glass looks cleaner than semi-frameless, but semi-frameless is more forgiving of walls that aren’t perfectly plumb, which describes a lot of older Cherry Hills homes.

Tile choices come down to preference and maintenance appetite. Large format porcelain has fewer grout lines, which means fewer places for mineral buildup to settle. Natural stone looks incredible but wants sealing on a schedule. Neither is wrong.

The straightforward walk-in. Curb, glass door or panel, tiled walls, one showerhead, clean lines. Great for anyone who wants a solid upgrade without pushing the budget. Fits the original footprint of most alcove tubs almost exactly.

The curbless, aging-in-place approach. No lip to step over, a linear drain instead of a center drain, wider door opening, sometimes a fold-down bench. This is what we recommend when a client mentions parents moving in, mobility concerns, or a plan to stay in the house through retirement. Cherry Hills Village has a lot of homeowners who bought decades ago and have no interest in downsizing, and this style of shower is often what makes staying possible.

The larger footprint spa build. Sometimes the tub to shower conversion becomes the excuse to rethink the whole bathroom. We take out a linen closet, borrow space from an adjacent bedroom, or reshape the vanity area to give the shower more square footage. Room for two people, dual controls, a rain head plus a handheld, maybe a steam feature.

None of these is objectively better than the others. It’s a matter of matching the shower to the household.

A Few Design Cues We’ve Seen Work Well In Cherry Hills Homes

The housing stock in the Village runs the gamut. You have the classic 1960s ranches with lower ceilings and modest primary bathrooms, larger 1980s builds with sunken tubs that scream for a redo, and newer construction from the 2000s onward with more generous footprints to work with.

For the older ranch style homes, we lean toward designs that don’t try to force a huge shower into a space that can’t really hold one. A wellproportioned walk-in with a niche, good lighting, and quality glass reads much better than an oversized shower crammed against a slanted ceiling.

For the 80s and 90s homes with the sunken tub setups, pulling out that whole platform and rebuilding the floor gives you tremendous flexibility. This is often where we can deliver a genuinely dramatic transformation.

Newer homes usually have the space, so the conversation becomes about details: bench shape, niche placement, whether to run tile to the ceiling, lighting inside the shower itself.

How do we handle the water shutoff during work?

For most conversions we only need to shut water to the bathroom itself, not the whole house, and only for short periods. You’ll have running water in the kitchen and other bathrooms almost the entire time.

What’s the first step if we want to actually move forward?

An in-home consultation. We look at the bathroom, talk through what you want, take measurements, and give you a real sense of what’s possible in the space. From there we can put together a proposal that reflects the actual project rather than a rough guess.