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The 1st floor bathroom in the house is pretty small...only 5 x 7, but it hadn't been updated since the house was purchased back in the 60's. Needless to say it was in bad need of a facelift. However, we never just give facelifts...we demolish and start over.

This is how it looked before:

Actually, the existing tub was only 59", but it seemed to cramp the space. We decided to remove it, but to do that, we had to rip the walls down to the studs. We really wanted to put in a neo-angle corner shower, but everything that we saw was too big. Yeah, we could take the plunge and spec out our own shower, tile the walls (again) and on and on...but we were trying to stay within a budget and keep things easy at the same time. Enter the steam shower.

I was searching the Intarwebs one day and came across these freestanding steam shower units. They seemed right up my alley. After a lot of research, planning, measuring, re-researching, comparing, and shopping, we decided to go with the Wasauna 2220. Why this one? It has 12 massage jets, a rainfall shower, handheld shower, radio, and phone. Neat. Here's a pic.

Once we started the demolition, we found out that there were actually THREE layers of tile on the walls. We gained almost 2 full inches of room by gutting the bath.

Unfortunately, we also found that the plumbing wasn't nearly up to code and that we would have to rip all that out and start over. Oh, and as a side note, the electrician was none too happy to have to run a 30A circuit and a phone line to the back of a shower. Hey, it's a first for everyone!

After a little elbow grease, the bath was down to studs....

the view from the hallway

where the vanity once sat
we're replacing this with a Vessel Sink