The primary bathroom is the one you use half-asleep every morning and the one that decides whether the bedroom suite feels finished. It is also, in most Sacramento houses built from the 1980s on, the room holding a corner garden tub nobody has filled in a decade.
The garden tub question
That tub takes roughly a quarter of the floor in a typical 1990s primary bath. The most common — and most transformative — remodel we do is taking it out and giving the space to the shower: a large tiled walk-in with a bench, a niche and frameless glass, in the footprint the tub was wasting.
If you still want a tub, a freestanding one takes far less room than a decked-in garden tub and reads better. If nobody in the house takes baths, the honest answer is to lose it — provided there is a tub elsewhere for resale. We will say which way we would go once we have seen the room.
What a primary bath usually includes
- A double vanity, sized to the wall rather than to a stock width, with drawer banks notched around the plumbing — see bathroom vanities
- A tiled walk-in shower with proper pan slope, full waterproofing, niches and a bench: walk-in showers
- Frameless glass measured after the tile is set: shower glass and enclosures
- A separate water closet where the layout already has one, or blocking for a future door
- Heated floors, worth doing while the floor is open
- Lighting at the mirror rather than only above it, plus a fan that actually moves the air
- Storage — a linen tower or built-in cabinet in the same finish as the vanity
Time and sequence
Four to six weeks is typical for a full primary bath: demolition, plumbing and electrical rough-in, waterproofing and inspection where required, tile, vanity and stone, then glass once the tile is set — glass is always last, because it is measured off what was actually built.
If the household has one bathroom, we sequence around that and tell you honestly which days it is out of service.
Smaller scopes, if the whole room does not need it: a wet-area-only remodel rebuilds the shower and leaves the rest; a vanity and top swap is a single day.
