Franktown's
Trusted Team for Walk-in Shower Installation

Why Walk In Showers Have Taken Over Franktown Bathrooms

A More Open Start to the Day in Franktown

The shift away from tubs is not really about trends. It comes down to how people actually use their bathrooms. Most Franktown homes have at least one tub tucked into a guest bath or a kid’s bathroom, so the primary suite tub often goes years without a single soak. Meanwhile it eats up floor space, blocks light, and forces anyone showering to step over a wall every morning.

A walk in shower opens the whole footprint. You get a wider entry, a bigger showering area, and a clean sightline across the room. In older Franktown homes with lower ceilings or narrower layouts, that visual openness can make a bathroom feel like it grew by ten square feet without anyone touching a wall.

There is also the practical side. Douglas County water runs hard, and mineral buildup on tub jets, sliding door tracks, and textured fiberglass takes real effort to keep clean. Large format tile, quartz slabs, and glass panels handle the local water chemistry better and wipe down in a fraction of the time.

Tub Alcove Conversions
The five foot tub alcove is the most common candidate. Pulling the tub and building a curbed or curbless shower in that exact footprint gives you a spacious single user shower with room for a bench, a niche, and often a fixed glass panel instead of a door.

Full Primary Bath Reworks
When a homeowner is ready to lose the tub entirely and rethink the whole room, the walk in shower usually anchors the design. Double vanities, heated floors, and a freestanding tub across the room are common companions, but the shower is the visual centerpiece.

Corner Stall Rebuilds
Older Franktown homes sometimes have a small neo angle shower crammed into a corner. These rarely get saved. We typically rework the plumbing and floor plan to square off the space, giving the homeowner a proper walk in with a linear drain and a full glass enclosure.

What Actually Goes Into the Build

The Work Behind a Reliable Walk In Shower Installation

People often ask what really happens between the demo day and the reveal. The short version is that a good walk in shower is mostly what you do not see.

Waterproofing is where the money hides. A tiled shower that skips proper membrane work will look fine for two years and then start telling on itself through grout lines, baseboards, and eventually the ceiling below. In Franktown, where a lot of primary baths sit on second floors above finished basements or living rooms, that failure gets expensive fast. We build every shower with a fully bonded waterproof system behind the tile, sloped preslopes under the pan, and sealed penetrations at every fixture.

Framing and blocking matter too. Grab bars, benches, floating shelves, and glass panels all need solid wood behind the substrate. Adding it during the rough stage costs almost nothing. Adding it later means opening the wall again.

The plumbing side usually involves relocating the drain, moving the valve to a smarter height, and often upgrading from a single showerhead setup to a valve that can run a rainhead and a handheld at the same time. Franktown homes on well water sometimes need pressure balancing that a builder grade setup was never designed for, and this is the moment to address it.

Design Choices Worth Slowing Down For

A walk in shower is one of those projects where the small decisions carry more weight than they look like they should. A few worth thinking through:

• Niche placement. Building the niche on the wet wall keeps plumbing simple. Building it on a side wall keeps it out of the direct spray, which extends the life of your shampoo bottles and the grout around them.s.
• Curb or curbless. Curbless looks incredible and reads modern, but it needs a recessed subfloor or a raised bathroom floor to work correctly. Not every Franktown home can accommodate it without significant framing changes.
• Door, panel, or open entry. A single fixed glass panel keeps the room feeling open and cuts down on cleaning. A hinged door contains steam better in colder Franktown winters. An open walk in with no glass at all works if the shower is deep enough to keep spray contained.
• Bench versus foot ledge. A full bench serves anyone who wants to sit, shave, or age in place comfortably. A small foot ledge takes up less space and handles the shaving job without dominating the shower.

Materials That Hold Up in the Colorado Climate

Franktown gets dry winters, wide temperature swings, and mineral heavy water. Materials that shrug all of that off tend to be the same ones that photograph well.

Porcelain tile in large format is the workhorse. It resists staining, tolerates the freeze thaw cycle if your bathroom sits on an exterior wall, and comes in patterns that mimic marble or concrete convincingly. Natural stone still has a place, especially in higher end Franktown primary suites, but it needs sealing on a schedule and does not forgive hard water the way porcelain does.

For shower pans, a single slab of quartz or a poured pan finished with tile both work well. Prefabricated acrylic pans are cheaper but read cheaper too, and they rarely last as long in a home that gets daily use.

Glass is where a lot of homeowners want to save money and later wish they had not. Half inch low iron glass costs more upfront but stays clearer over time, resists the greenish tint standard glass picks up under Franktown light, and holds its coatings against hard water better than thinner options.

Can any bathroom fit a walk in shower?

Most can, though the layout of the existing plumbing and the location of load bearing walls sometimes shape what is possible. A home visit usually clears this up in about twenty minutes.

Will removing the tub hurt resale in Franktown?

Only if it leaves the home with zero tubs. As long as another bathroom in the house has one, most Franktown buyers prefer a large primary shower over a rarely used soaking tub.