Full Bathroom Renovation — Kelowna

The situation

A Kelowna homeowner with a tired bathroom — dated vinyl flooring over a softening subfloor, a shower with failing grout and outdated tile, and storage built for a different decade. The client wanted a clean, modern bathroom with a fully waterproofed shower, a built-in niche for bottles, and tile large enough that the grid read as a calm field instead of a busy pattern.

What we did

Full gut to the studs. We hauled out the old vinyl and pulled the subfloor back to check the joists — no rot, but the original substrate was under-specced for a tile finish, so we added a layer of plywood and bonded in a floor membrane system to decouple the tile from any future movement.

The shower got a complete waterproofing build: cement backer board on every wet wall, a liquid-applied membrane over every seam and corner, a sloped mud bed to the drain, and a framed niche that was waterproofed integrally with the wall — no after-the-fact cut-in. We dry-laid the large-format porcelain before the thinset went down to plan the grid, then set each tile with full back-butter coverage and levelling clips on every seam so the finished surface reads flat from any angle.

The result

A bathroom that will outlast the house it's in. Waterproofing is sealed from the subfloor up through every corner of the shower. The tile field is tight, level, and calm. The niche is the feature detail it deserves to be. Before-and-after, it's a different room.