Walk-in shower in Davie, slab or raised.

The subdivision houses sit on a slab. The newer estate homes in Long Lake Ranches and Imagination Farms are often two stories, with the primary bath on a framed floor. And almost 15 percent of all Davie housing is a mobile home, concentrated on the east side. Each one gets a different walk-in.

• Slab: a curbless entry means recessing the shower footprint or using a low-profile linear drain, with the drain body set in mortar by the licensed plumber. A 2-inch curb is the alternative that needs no concrete work.
• Framed second floor: the easiest zero entry there is. I recess the subfloor between the joists and the shower floor comes out flush with the bathroom tile, no cutting concrete at all.
• Mobile home: the floor is framed and the drain is reachable from underneath, so a low-threshold tiled shower is possible, but I keep the build light and I'll tell you honestly if the floor isn't up to tile.
• Every version gets the same pan: sloped mortar, sheet membrane folded up the walls and over the drain flange, and a 24-hour flood test before any tile.

Davie's own water-and-sewer ordinance says plainly that numerous homes get their water from wells, and rural-estate parcels can stay on a well if the owner files an annual test that covers bacteria, lead, nitrates, hardness, iron and hydrogen sulfide. For a walk-in shower that list matters: iron is what turns white grout orange and hardness is what spots glass. On a well I ask for your last test, and I'll usually suggest a darker grout or an epoxy grout and a squeegee for the frameless panel. Homes on Davie Utilities get water from the System V plant, reverse osmosis from the deep Floridan Aquifer in 2025, which is a different story: soft, with 53 ppm sodium. Other streets are on Sunrise, Hollywood, Ferncrest, Broward County or Fort Lauderdale water, and the town publishes a lookup.

A walk-in that's meant to last into your seventies and eighties is built a little differently, and I build every one that way whether you ask or not: solid blocking behind the tile where grab bars go, a tiled bench poured into the pan, a hand-held shower on a slide bar and a threshold you don't have to think about. Park City Estates on NW 86th Avenue is a 55-plus mobile-home community of about 1,200 sites, and the question there is the floor; see the first section.

• The town's Home Repair Program funds plumbing and health-and-safety work for extremely-low and very-low-income owner-occupants, with a 20 percent set-aside for special-needs households, but it excludes mobile homes and the town is clear that repair is not remodeling. If it may fit, call 954-797-1173 and I'll write the itemized quote.
• Grab bars themselves can go on now or in ten years; the blocking is what costs nothing today and everything later.