Should I take the bath out and fit a shower instead?

This decision is usually presented as a taste question and it is mostly a practical one. Two things dominate: whether the household genuinely needs a bath, and whether the existing waste and soil connections will suit whatever goes in. Everything else — the look, the resale opinion, the water use — is secondary to those two.

Step by step

1. Count how many bathrooms the house has.If this is the only bathroom, removing the bath entirely is a decision with consequences for anyone bathing a small child, anyone who needs to soak an injury, and anyone selling to a family. If there is another bath in the house, the constraint disappears.
2. Be honest about how often the bath is used.Many households genuinely never fill the bath and use it purely as a shower tray. If that is you, an enclosure gives a far better showering experience in the same footprint, and it removes the daily awkwardness of stepping over a high rim.
3. Consider a shower over the bath as the middle answer.A decent mixer or electric shower with a proper screen over an existing bath keeps both options, costs a fraction of a bathroom refit and needs no drainage work. For a lot of households this is the right answer and it does not get considered because the question was framed as either-or.
4. Check where the waste goes.This is where the money is. A shower tray fitted in the bath's footprint can normally use the existing waste run, which keeps the job small. Moving the shower to a different corner means running new waste with an adequate fall to reach the stack, and on a solid floor that can be genuinely difficult.
5. Check the step-in height.A bath rim is a high step. If anyone in the household has mobility difficulties now, or is likely to, a low-profile tray or a level-access shower is a substantial everyday improvement. This is often the strongest argument in the whole decision and it is the one people leave out.
6. Think about how it looks and feels in a small room.A clear-glass enclosure and a visible floor make a small bathroom look bigger; a bath with a panel makes it look like a corridor. But a full-length bath with a screen keeps the floor space in front of it, where an enclosure has a door that may swing into it.
7. Take the resale argument with proportion.The conventional wisdom that a house needs a bath is really about family buyers and about a house having at least one bath somewhere. A one-bedroom flat with a good shower and no bath is not penalised the way a four-bedroom family house with no bath is. Match the decision to the property and the likely buyer, not to a general rule.
8. Cost the whole job, not the fitting.The tray or bath is a small fraction. Removal and disposal, any drainage change, tiling to a new height or a new area, tanking, an enclosure or screen, making good the floor, and the labour are the cost. Scope all of it before deciding, because the difference between reusing the waste position and moving it can double the figure.
9. Look at the floor before you commit.Whatever goes in, the floor under the existing bath has probably not been seen for twenty years and is quite often damp or damaged. Budget for finding something, because doing that work afterwards means taking the new fitting out again.

Questions people ask