Tub to Shower Conversion in Cherry Hills Village: A Smart Upgrade for Denver Homeowners

Tub to Shower Conversion in Cherry Hills Village

Most homes in Cherry Hills Village have more bathrooms than the family ever touches, and at least one of them holds a tub nobody has filled in years. It sits in the corner of the primary bath collecting dust and taking up the best stretch of floor in the room. Ask yourself when you last ran an actual bath. If the honest answer is “sometime last winter,” that tub is costing you space it no longer earns.

That is why a tub to shower conversion has become one of the most requested projects across the south Denver metro. Homeowners here want a shower they walk straight into, not a wall they climb over every morning. This guide walks through what the switch costs around Cherry Hills Village, what crews tend to uncover behind older tub walls, and how to plan a conversion that suits an estate-level home.

Space and daily use. Pull the tub and the room breathes. A walk in shower reads larger than a tub and surround combo, even when the footprint stays the same. You also skip the daily step over, which stops feeling minor the longer you live with it.

Staying in the home for the long haul. Cherry Hills Village has one of the highest homeownership rates in Colorado, and residents tend to settle in for decades. A low threshold shower with a built in bench and well placed grab bars removes the biggest obstacle in the room without making the space look clinical. Plan the details right and the shower looks like something any guest would happily use, while quietly supporting anyone who wants to age in place.

Cleaning and hard water. Front Range water runs hard, and mineral buildup shows fast on old tub surrounds and framed glass. A conversion is the moment to choose surfaces and glass coatings that shrug off the spotting our water is known for.

Basic swap, roughly $3,000 to $5,500. The tub comes out, the drain gets adapted, and a prefabricated acrylic shower and surround drop into the old alcove. Nothing moves. This works for a guest bath or a rental, though acrylic reads as acrylic and adds little at resale.

Tiled conversion in the same footprint, roughly $6,500 to $13,000. Same alcove and drain location, but now you are paying for a proper shower pan, full waterproofing, tile, and a glass door. This is the sweet spot for most primary baths in the area.

High-end curbless build, roughly $14,000 to $24,000 and up. Custom tile, a linear drain, frameless glass, a bench, and sometimes relocated plumbing. For estate homes where the rest of the bathroom already sits at a high finish level, this tier keeps the shower from looking like the one thing that got cut.

Your final number depends on layout, whether plumbing has to move, the materials you pick, and what the crew finds once the old tub is gone.

Designing a Shower Worth Walking Into

Why Colorado’s Dry Climate Works in Your Favor

Once the tub is out, the design choices set the tone for the whole room. A few that pay off in homes at this level:

• Curbless entry with a low-profile or linear drain, which looks clean and keeps the floor accessible for the long term.
• Large-format tile or a slab surround, which means fewer grout lines and less scrubbing against hard-water buildup.
• Frameless glass with a protective coating, which stays clearer than framed enclosures and suits a high-end space.
• A built-in bench and a recessed niche, both easier to add now than to retrofit later.
• A handheld sprayer paired with a rain or wall head, which makes cleaning the shower and rinsing off both easier.

Colorado’s dry climate helps here. Showers dry out fast, which cuts down on the mildew battles common in more humid regions, as long as the waterproofing underneath is done right. If you want the full walk-in look built from scratch rather than a straight swap, a dedicated walk-in shower installation gives you room to rethink the size and layout instead of working inside the old tub alcove.

Thinking Beyond The One Bathroom

Plenty of Cherry Hills Village homeowners start with the tub and realize the whole room, or the whole house, is due. If the layout no longer works or the finishes feel dated, a full new bathroom build lets you move the vanity, rework the lighting, and rethink the flow instead of designing around fixtures that were placed forty years ago.

The same logic applies downstairs. Adding a full bath as part of a basement remodeling project turns an unfinished level into a real guest suite or gym, and it is often where families choose to keep that second tub. And since the kitchen and primary bath tend to age at the same rate, some homeowners pair the conversion with a kitchen remodeling project to keep the finishes and timeline consistent across the home.

How The Project Actually Goes

A prefab swap can wrap in a couple of days. A tiled conversion usually runs one to three weeks depending on scope, materials, and drying time for waterproofing and mortar. The order rarely changes: protect the space and demo the tub, handle any plumbing changes, waterproof the pan and walls, set tile, then hang the glass once everything has cured. The steps you cannot see, the waterproofing and the pan, matter most. That is the layer that keeps water out of the walls of a home you plan to keep for a long time.