Tub to shower conversion in Pembroke Pines.

Those houses came with two tubs. The hall bath has a one-piece fiberglass tub-shower unit; the primary bath has a cultured-marble garden tub on a tiled deck with a cramped shower beside it. I convert both, differently. The fiberglass unit is cut into pieces and the studs behind it get cement board and blocking. The garden tub and its deck come out together, and the whole footprint becomes one large tiled walk-in with a bench and a double niche, which is usually the better conversion in a Pines house.

• Keep one tub in a family house if you can; in Pines, with 2.66 people per household, that's usually the hall bath.
• Garden-tub footprint: room for a 15-inch bench, a second niche, and often a hand-held on a slide bar beside the rain head.

The post-Andrew subdivisions west of I-75, SilverLakes with its 5,186 homes opened from 1991 to 1998, Chapel Trail, Pembroke Falls and Spring Valley, are mostly two-story, so the primary tub sits over a living room. The pan still gets built the same way, a mortar pre-slope to the drain, membrane, and a flood test before tile, but on a wood subfloor rather than a slab, with the floor below protected and the flood test held long enough to be sure. A moved drain upstairs means the plumber opens the ceiling below for the new line, and the patch and paint is its own line on the quote.

• SilverLakes sits on a former limestone mine. Nothing about that changes a second-floor shower, but the master association's modification rules are real and I bring the scope to them.
• Towngate requires vendors to sign its indemnification agreement before working in the community. I sign it.
• Pembroke Falls has four staffed gates, so the crew is on the gate list before day one.

Century Village is more than 7,000 condo units in four-story buildings from the early 1980s, legally 55-plus, and its Declaration sets how alterations happen and what insurance the association and the owner carry. The conversion there is a low-threshold tiled shower with a bench, blocking for bars and a hand-held, done inside the association's hours with the riser shut-off coordinated with the building. The city's own water helps: Biscayne Aquifer wells 90 to 144 feet deep, softened and chlorinated, with no lead service lines in the inventory, so new glass and fixtures hold up with a squeegee.

• The city's utilities line is 954-518-9000 if the main shut-off at the meter is seized, which happens in a house that has never had one turned.
• One in five Pines residents is 65 or over; the accessible bathroom page covers the full version of this job.