The primary bathrooms in Plano’s 1980s and 1990s production homes follow a pattern you’ll recognize: a corner garden tub under a glass block window, a shower stall barely 36 inches wide, a double vanity with a cultured marble top, and a toilet in its own small closet. The tub gets used a few times a year. The shower gets used every day and feels like a phone booth. Our bathroom remodeling service page covers everything we do in baths; this page covers how that mismatch gets fixed in Plano homes.
The primary bath Plano built in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kings Ridge, Deerfield, Willow Bend, and Prestonwood primary baths typically give you 100 to 150 square feet, which is plenty. The problem is how that space is divided: the tub deck eats the best corner, the shower is wedged next to it, the vanity wall is long but shallow, and storage is a single linen cabinet.
We usually redraw the room around a large shower where the tub was, a vanity that keeps 2 sinks but gains drawer storage, and a toilet room that stays put because moving it on a slab rarely earns its cost. All of this gets modeled in 3D so you can judge the proportions before we order tile.
Garden tub to shower conversions on a slab.
Almost every Plano home from this era sits on a concrete slab, and that shapes the conversion. The garden tub’s drain sits at one end of the platform, and a shower that fills that footprint needs its drain near the center, or along one wall for a linear drain. Either way we saw-cut the slab, trench to the new location, tie into the existing drain, and pour the concrete back before the shower pan goes in.
In Ridgeview Ranch and Russell Creek, where homes are a decade or so newer, the slab is often post-tensioned, so we locate the cables before cutting. In older East Plano ranches around Park Forest and Los Rios, the drains under the slab may be original cast iron, and we’ll tell you if the section we expose is worth replacing while it’s open.
Curbless showers work on a slab with planning: we either recess the shower floor by lowering the concrete or raise the surrounding floor slightly so the shower slopes to the drain. That decision happens in design, not during demo.
The glass block window and other exterior changes.
That glass block window over the tub was meant to give light without a view. When the tub goes, you have 3 options: keep it as the shower’s window, replace it with an operable window of the same size, or remove it and fill the opening with matching brick. The first is interior work. The other 2 change the exterior, which means your HOA’s architectural control committee likely wants to review them. We prepare the ACC submittal with the elevation and material samples. Homes in the downtown Plano historic district near 15th Street have an additional layer, the Heritage Commission, and we build that review into the timeline.
Second-floor hall baths and jack-and-jill layouts.
Two-story plans in Hunters Glen, Whiffletree, and Russell Creek usually have a hall bath with a 60-inch tub and shower combination serving 2 or 3 bedrooms, and 1990s plans often use a jack-and-jill layout with a shared tub room between 2 vanity areas. Upstairs the floor is wood framed, so relocating a drain means opening the ceiling below rather than cutting concrete, which makes a wider vanity or a repositioned tub far less disruptive than the same move downstairs.
In single-story East Plano homes near the Douglass Community and Timber Brook, the hall bath is often the only full bath for guests and kids, so we stage the work to keep a bathroom working for you. If the whole house is on the table, see whole-home remodeling in Plano.
Waterproofing, ventilation, and what the inspector checks.
A shower fails at the corners, the curb, and the niche, not in the field tile. We run a continuous waterproofing membrane over the pan and walls, flood test the pan before tile, and slope the niche shelves. Exhaust fans get sized for the room and ducted outside, not into the attic.
The City of Plano Building Inspections Department inspects plumbing and electrical at rough-in and everything again at final. Inspectors look at the drain test, the valve, GFCI protection on the vanity circuits, and the fan duct. We schedule the inspections and meet the inspector.
Permits, HOA review, and how we run the job.
We pull the Plano permits and handle the ACC submittal if your project touches the exterior. The process is the same for every bath: a consultation and site walk first, where we look under the vanity and at the tub deck to see what’s really there; a 3D design so you can stand in the new shower before it exists; a fixed-scope proposal with allowances for tile and fixtures you haven’t picked yet, and written change orders for anything that shifts; one project manager with a written photo update every week; a final walkthrough with a punch list; and a care guide for grout, glass, and fixtures. The full sequence is on our process page.
If the kitchen is next, see kitchen remodeling in Plano. We do the same bath work in Tarrant County, covered under bathroom remodeling in Fort Worth, and everything we do in this city is on our Plano service area page.
Ready to stop stepping around a tub you never use? Book a consultation and we’ll walk your bath with you, confirm what the slab and walls allow, and show you the new shower in 3D.
