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Every few months somebody on a Renton neighborhood forum asks the same question. They’re redoing the bathroom, they never take baths, and they want to know if ripping out the tub is going to cost them at resale. The replies are always split down the middle, and half of them are from people who don’t live here.
So I called someone who does this for a living in this specific city. Vasile Teterea is the owner of Firm Remodeling LLC, a licensed Washington contractor (#FIRMRRL783PU) who remodels bathrooms and kitchens around Renton and the surrounding King County suburbs. He’s worked on the postwar ramblers up in the Highlands, the split-levels around Benson Hill, and the newer tract homes out toward Fairwood, which turns out to matter a lot, because his answer changes depending on which of those you own.
We talked for about forty minutes. This is an edited version.
The short answer: count your bathrooms first
Tub or walk-in shower? Is there an actual rule?
Depends how many bathrooms you have. That’s the whole thing, honestly. If it’s your only full bath, keep a tub. If you have two and the other one has a tub in it, do whatever you want.
That’s it? That’s the rule?
That’s most of it. People want a more interesting answer, but that’s the one that keeps them out of trouble.
Why does the number of bathrooms matter that much?
Because of who buys the house after you. I’ve had clients pull the only tub out of a three bedroom home, love it for six years, then go to sell and have their agent tell them families with small kids are skipping the listing. You can’t bathe a toddler in a curbless shower. Well, you can, but you’re on your knees doing it, and buyers know that when they walk through.
I’m not saying it kills a sale. I’m saying it narrows who’s interested, and in a three bedroom house in Renton a lot of your buyers are young families. That’s just who’s shopping in this price range.
What if the house already has two bathrooms?
Then the hall bath keeps the tub and the primary can be shower only. Nobody’s going to complain. That’s the setup I’d put in my own house.
Small bathrooms in older Renton homes
How does a 5×8 bathroom change the decision?
The five by eight. Yeah. Anything built here in the late forties through the sixties, especially up in the Highlands where they threw up housing for the Boeing plant workers, you’re looking at a five by eight bathroom with a sixty inch alcove tub, a vanity, and a toilet, and that’s the room.
In that footprint the tub is doing you a favor. It’s sixty inches long and about thirty wide, and it eats that space efficiently. If you take it out and put in a shower, you either build a sixty by thirty shower, which is fine but it’s not the spa thing people are picturing, or you shrink it and now you’ve got dead floor space that doesn’t do anything.
So you talk people out of it?
I talk them through it. There’s a version that works. Sixty by thirty-two walk-in, low curb or curbless, glass panel instead of a full enclosure so the room reads bigger, decent tile, and a niche so shampoo bottles aren’t sitting on the floor. That’s a nice bathroom. It’s just not the magazine one, and I’d rather say that in the first meeting than have somebody disappointed in week three.
What a tub-to-shower conversion costs in Renton
What actually drives the price difference between a tub and a shower?
Where the drain is.
A tub drain and a shower drain aren’t in the same place. Tub drain sits at one end. Shower drain usually wants to be centered, or wherever you put the low point. So a conversion almost always means moving the drain, and how hard that is comes down to what’s under your floor.
Why does crawlspace versus slab matter so much?
A lot of the older Renton stock is crawlspace. That’s the good scenario. Somebody goes under, cuts in, reroutes, done, and it’s not a big line item.
Slab is the other one. Some of the seventies and eighties builds, some of the newer stuff. Then you’re saw-cutting concrete, trenching, repouring. It’s dirty, it’s loud, it adds days, and it adds real money. I’ve seen the same conversion come in six or seven thousand apart on two houses a mile from each other purely because of that.
What’s a realistic budget range?
I’ll give you ranges, not quotes, because I’ve never seen two bathrooms price the same.
Tub to shower, same footprint, crawlspace access, mid-range finishes, you’re generally in the mid teens. Full gut of a small bath with new plumbing, tile, vanity, lighting, fan, call it low to high twenties depending on what you pick. Slab work, add to that. Freestanding tub with a floor-mounted filler, add to that too, because those things are heavy and the filler has to come up through the floor in exactly the right spot.
Anybody who gives you a firm number over the phone without seeing the room is guessing, and the guess will be low.
Are curbless showers worth the extra work?
They’re great. They also mean dropping the subfloor so water runs the right direction, which means getting at the joists from below. Crawlspace, usually doable. Second floor over a finished ceiling, now you’re opening up a ceiling downstairs, and people don’t budget for that.
So it’s not a no. It’s a “let me look under your house first.”
Building a bathroom that survives a Puget Sound winter
What should Renton homeowners know about waterproofing and ventilation?
I’d argue people underspend on both.
We get around forty-some inches of rain a year and the humidity sits high all winter. A bathroom in Renton is wet more of the year than a bathroom in Phoenix. So the waterproofing behind the tile is the part I care most about, and it’s the part nobody sees or brags about. If somebody’s bidding your job and can’t tell you what waterproofing system they’re using behind the tile, that’s the question I’d push on.
Same with the fan. Half the older bathrooms I open up have a fan that either doesn’t move enough air or vents straight into the attic, which is how you end up with a mold problem above your head. It should be sized for the room and it should duct all the way outside. It’s a cheap part of the job. It’s also the part that determines whether your new tile still looks new in eight years.
Accessibility, lead-safe work, and permits
How does aging in place change the design?
It comes up more than people expect, because there are a lot of long-time owners here who aren’t moving.
If you’re over sixty, or you’re redoing a bathroom for a parent, a walk-in makes a lot of sense. Getting a leg over a tub wall is how people fall. But do it properly. Block the walls for grab bars now even if you don’t install them yet, because blocking is nearly free while the wall is open and expensive later. Thirty-six inch door if the framing allows. Bench in the shower. Handheld sprayer on a slide bar.
You can do all that and it doesn’t have to look like a hospital. That’s a design problem, not a plumbing problem.
What about lead paint in homes built before 1978?
Anything built before 1978, we follow lead-safe work practices. That covers a big chunk of the housing around here. It’s an EPA program, it’s not optional for a contractor doing this kind of work, and if a bidder tells you it doesn’t apply to a bathroom demo I’d move on.
Do you need a permit for a bathroom remodel in Renton?
If you’re only swapping a vanity and painting, generally no. Once you’re moving plumbing or changing electrical, which is basically every tub to shower conversion, you’re in permit territory with the City of Renton. Homeowners should confirm the specifics with the Permit Center, since the thresholds get updated, but the short version is that a real remodel gets permitted and inspected.
We pull it. I’d be suspicious of anyone offering to skip it to save you a few hundred dollars, because that shows up later when you sell and an inspector notices work that has no record.
How long does a bathroom remodel take?
Small bathroom, straightforward, two to three weeks of actual work. Slab or structural surprises push it. The thing that blows schedules isn’t usually the labor, it’s a vanity or tile with a long lead time that somebody ordered late. We try to have materials on site before demo starts so the room isn’t sitting open waiting on a delivery.
Hiring a bathroom remodeler near you
People search “bathroom remodeling near me” and get thirty results. Does local actually matter?
It matters for a boring reason: we know what’s behind the walls before we open them.
I can walk into a Highlands rambler and tell you roughly what era the plumbing is, whether the panel is going to be a problem, what the subfloor’s like. That’s not talent, it’s just having done sixty of them. Someone dispatching a crew from two counties over is learning your house on your dime.
The other one is that we’re still here in a year. If a shower door’s out of alignment in February, we’re twenty minutes away.
What would you tell someone standing in their bathroom deciding right now?
Count your bathrooms first. Then go look at how the room is actually shaped instead of at photos online, because the photos are all big bathrooms and yours probably isn’t.
And go see finished work in person if you can. We keep before and after photos from local projects on our site, but even better, ask any contractor you’re considering for an address of something they finished nearby and go stand in it. Fifteen minutes in a real bathroom tells you more than an hour of scrolling.
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