Walk-in showers, custom tile, Kerdi waterproofing, and accessibility upgrades. Built to last twenty years and to be safe wet.
Water where it shouldn't be is the bathroom's one unrecoverable failure mode. Every other thing — a tile that doesn't match, a vanity that's the wrong height, a fan that's too loud — can be fixed by changing the part. A leak inside a wall takes the wall, the framing, and sometimes the floor below it. So a proper bathroom rebuild starts at the waterproofing membrane, not the tile.
A bathroom remodel is a small room with a lot of trades stacked into it. Demo, framing, plumbing rough-in, electrical, drywall, waterproofing, tile, vanity, fixtures, paint, accessory mount, and a final test of every drain — the order matters and the timing is tight. We do all of it, in that order, and we don't subcontract any of the trades that touch water.
Most bathrooms we walk into need a full gut, not a refresh. Refreshes (paint, vanity, fixtures) work when the waterproofing is sound and the tub or shower is in good shape. They don't work when the previous job was tiled directly to drywall, when the pan is soft underfoot, or when the fan exhausts into the attic instead of out a soffit. We open one wall, look, and tell you which one you have before we quote — and what a full GTA bathroom actually costs in 2026 is laid out so you can sanity-check any number we give you.
Priya and Raj called us about converting their main-floor tub into a walk-in shower. Both of them are in their early sixties, both want to stay in the house long-term, and Raj's mother — who lives with them — was already finding the tub hard to step over.
They wanted accessibility now, not five years from now, when they'd be retrofitting around drywall they'd just paid to install.
Demo took a day. The tub came out, the wet-wall opened up, and we found what we usually find on a 1990s house: subfloor rotted around the toilet flange (a slow leak from a wax ring that hadn't been replaced in twenty years), one stud with mold at the base, and a vent fan that exhausted into the attic instead of out the soffit. We pulled all of it. The bathroom shrank by an inch on the wet wall to give us room for proper backing, then grew back to spec.
The new shower is curbless, three feet deep, with a linear drain at the wall. The pan slopes 1/4" per foot to the drain. Behind the tile is Schluter Kerdi membrane on every wall, taped at every seam, with a pre-formed shower pan integrated into the floor.
The doorway widened from 28" to 36" — wide enough for a walker if it ever comes to that. Grab bars went in at the code height (33–36" from the finished floor), screwed into solid blocking we added behind the tile during framing.
Final walk-through, Priya stepped into the shower with her shoes on and didn't have to lift a foot. Raj's mom walked in behind her and turned around in the middle of the shower without anyone holding the wall. Three weeks demo to handshake.
“I stepped in with my shoes on and didn't have to lift a foot.”
The Kerdi system is a fabric-faced polyethylene membrane that sits between the cement board and the thinset, taped at every seam, sealed at every penetration. It's the actual waterproofing layer on the shower — the tile is just the wear surface. We use it on every shower we build, no upgrades, no opt-outs. Skipping it is the single most common reason a 5-year-old bathroom needs to be torn out and rebuilt.
A curbless shower stays inside the shower because the floor slopes toward the drain at exactly 1/4 inch per foot — code minimum, the lowest you can go and still drain reliably. We set the slope before the membrane goes in, flood-test the pan with the drain plugged for 24 hours, and only tile after we've confirmed there are no slow leaks. A linear drain at one wall lets the slope go in a single direction instead of four, which makes large-format tile sit flat without lippage.
Curbless entries, 36-inch doorways, grab bars at 33–36 inches mounted into blocking we add behind the tile during framing, comfort-height toilets, lever-handle faucets, and slip-resistant porcelain mosaic on the floor. We build to these specs by default on every bathroom job rather than treating them as an upgrade. None of it costs more if you plan it in from the start.
Porcelain large-format wall tile (12×24 or 24×48 — fewer grout lines, fewer places for water to find), porcelain mosaic on the shower floor for slip resistance, Schluter trims at every outside corner, Schluter Kerdi membrane behind every tiled wall and shower pan, Toto or Kohler fixtures, Panasonic WhisperGreen exhaust fans vented to the exterior (never the attic), and solid wood vanities — no particleboard anywhere water can reach. The built-in niches, bench frames, and scribed vanity casework are cut by the same crew that runs trim on our other jobs, not a cabinet shop we hand the drawings to.
Behind the tile, on top of the cement board, we install a Schluter Kerdi membrane on every wall and a pre-sloped pan on the floor. Every seam gets taped with Kerdi-Band and thinset. The membrane is the waterproofing layer; the tile is the wear surface. Done right, the cement board behind it stays bone-dry for the life of the bathroom.
Converting a tub to a curbless walk-in shower is a framing job, a waterproofing job, and a building-code job stacked on top of each other. Here's how we do it in Mississauga.
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