c9 | Sometimes I get very wet in my special places...

Home ownership is fun!

No really. Except our shower is leaking. After every shower there's a puddle on the floor, and I thought it was just the substandard IKEA* shower curtain, but it turns out there's a real live leak. Somewhere in the wall between user input and water output. The drywall is spongy and wet, and the water's coming out a spot that is not designed to output water.

We had always planned to rip out the bathroom and make a better one. Looks like it's happening sooner than we thought. My parents did this walk-in shower thing at their place in Ottawa that we liked, so we're considering it for here. The diagram is not to scale or anything -- think regular tub length but double width.

Google SketchUp, by the way, is very cool. I made this in about three minutes:

I don't know who that woman is. Probably a local student. She came with the software. She will not be allowed to use the shower.

If you were buying a condo, would an unusual bathroom shower scare you off?

* Yes I just said that.

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Heck, no. A shower like that would be a bonus.

(And, yes, Google Sketch-Up rocks)

An unusual shower would probably increase resale value as long as it's done well. It seems that your model is into glass block, which is terribly dates as a late-80's early 90's shower partition...which scares me.

There's no light above the shower, though I suppose we could change that at the same time. What would you use for that partition instead?

You can get a couple tempered class sheets, frosted for privacy or even some resin sheets with embedded with natural materials for texture and interest.

There are many options.

I'd have to seek out an example to see if I'd like it. One nice thing about blocks is the staircase effect we can build to let in more light. Not sure how easy it is to work with those sheets.

You can go to showrooms for bathroom fixtures which usually highlight things like this in their displays for an idea or two. Glass block is easy for the do-it-yourself method though.

One thing we're considering is having my dad come down and run the show, with me as his grunt. If we use the glass blocks, it'll be like he's getting to do the same project he did in Ottawa, but he can fix his mistakes. :)

Dads are good for that. You pretend you need to learn how to do something and then they do it while you watch and pass tools.

Gah, I need to download that. I love doing that sort of thing -- my favorite part of The Sims is designing houses (not necessarily the whole living in them thing).

Walk-in showers as opposed to stalls or bathtubs are awesome. Especially if they have TWO shower heads. And a light. A light is good. But yeah, it'd have to be done well, for sure.

walk in showers are awesome.

and what's wrong with IKEA shower curtains? I like the one I just bought!

Ours isn't wide enough. I like it (clear plastic) but there's too much room for water spray on the edge. If I shift it close to the wall where the shower head is, then there's a 9" gap at the other end, and it bothers me. :)

do you have an unusually long shower?

I think we might. Because we used clear plastic IKEA shower curtains in other bathrooms and didn't have this problem.

Or perhaps we used Zellers clear plastic shower curtains and I didn't notice the size difference.

maybe it is longer. 'cause it fits fine in my bathroom.

although, i live in manhattan and everything is smaller here...

do you have a liner? is that the same length?

We have two IKEA curtains -- the clear plastic one on the inside, and a colourful cloth one on the outside. They're the same width and height.

i think you're shower's too long.

I will advise the committee of your recommendation.

I'd guess unusually long shower -- I'm pretty sure shower curtains are a standard 72" square. Then again, I have a faint recollection of someone else saying that they had to return their IKEA shower curtain because it was too small -- maybe making them only 63" square is how they pass the savings on to you. :-).

63" sounds more correct than 72", but I don't have it with me to check. :)

Didn't Douglas Adams say that you should never leave home without your shower curtain? :-).

He would never say something so absurd.

This happened to me too. They punched the holes on the wrong side.

I agree that a cool walk-in shower as opposed to the standard tub/shower combo would make the condo much more appealing to me. Tubs are next to useless for most adults, except on those rare Calgon-take-me-away days.

Hmmm...I've seen this a few times before. I personally like it, but for someone who likes having a bath - if that's the only bath in your house that you're removing - then it's not going to have the greatest resale value.

One of my friends did this to his ensuite shower though - he put in two shower heads, which was cool. Another friend of mine also had a similar deal, but he had the glass brick wall that you had to walk behind. He also had a villery and boch toilet LOL.

I remodeled my bathroom completely, as you may recall, and I put in a thermostatic shower and a jacuzzi tub. I got an offer from nearly every person who saw my house, based on the bathroom and remodeled kitchen alone.

You will see fantastic return on any improvements or unique features in either of these two areas.

you sure you didn't download Microsoft's Prison-Builder Vista in error?

That's so 1998.

I started condo shopping today. :)

I agree with the comment above about the glass blocks. Having just been through the hell that is house hunting, I have to say we saw some pretty sweet bathrooms with sheets of glass surrounding the shower. And I don't know that glass sheets/walls are difficult to install -- I've seen them put in numerous times on Holmes on Homes, so I'm now an expert.... :)

It is tough to assess the impact on resale value. I think a house not having a tub is a drawback, but I'm thinking that it wouldn't matter much in a condo (not having a tub, that is). You just have to keep the demographics and location of your building in mind, so that you have a sense of the type of people who would be looking to buy units there. If it is primarily young professionals and young couples, as opposed to say empty nesters, then I suspect that they won't care if it is missing a tub, as long as it has a beautiful shower.

And of all the friends I know that have sold their condos, it seems that the work that they did to differentiate their condos from all the other units on the market was a good thing for resale.

Here is a company that does great sheet materals you could use;

http://www.3-form.com/materials.php

Sometimes I get very wet in my special places...

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