Our master bathroom had a shallow bathtub on one side of the room and a beautiful walk-in shower on the other side.
I had initially wanted to swap out the bathtub for a deeper one, but after using the shallow tub as storage for a year, we decided to rip it out and convert it to a linen closet.
Our small house doesn’t have a lot of storage, so this ended up being the most practical and budget friendly solution for us!
This was by far the biggest and most laborious project we’ve taken on in this house. Before starting this project, we had zero experience with framing or drywall and learned so much by tackling this by ourselves! I’m not an expert by any means, so I’m not doing full tutorials on any step, but I have linked some tutorials and products that we found helpful!
Demo
Aside from being extremely dusty, demo was a painless process! Michael got the tub out with a pry bar and hammer. It was too damaged to be used again, but we were able to recycle it at our local recycling center. We shut off the valve where the shower head was and capped our drain pipe and glued it in place.
Framing
The pocket door kit we purchased came with very clear instructions about how to measure for the door opening and get set up to add the door. Other than measuring for our space, the only other thing to be mindful of was keeping things level.
Flooring
After we framed the walls, we had to gap in our flooring from where the tub was. We cleaned out the area and poured cement to raise it to the level of the existing flooring. After the cement was dry, we tiled the floor to match the rest of the room. The small space made this step go pretty quickly, but it still took an entire weekend to allow for everything to dry in between steps.
Hang the door
This is another step where we just followed the instructions that came with the pocket door kit. Any slab door can be made into a pocket door. The most important thing to note here is that you have to hang the door before you put up your drywall and there’s no going back to make repairs to the door after your drywall is up. Of course, you can redo the drywall, but just take your time and hang it right! We actually hung our door upside down on the first try and had to redo it, but it wasn’t too much of a hassle to do it again!
Drywall, tape & mud
After the framing was up and the door was hung, we were ready for drywall! Hanging try drywall went fairly quickly, but mudding was the most time consuming part of the entire process. We didn’t do a great job of hanging the drywall and had to pay for it in many hours and layers of mud. I don’t have any expert advice about mudding, but I found that it’s a fairly forgiving process. If you’re not a pro, you might just have to do a few more layers of mud and sanding to get it looking how you want it to. I used this tape, this mud, and these sanding blocks.
Finishing steps
After the final sanding, I primed, painted, installed baseboards, shelving, and the very last step was the door hardware.
This entire project cost us right around $500 and we’ve already been loving having the extra storage space! The next little project in this bathroom will be to replace the mirror with something a little more stylish.
