Every realtor, every appraiser, every YouTube renovation guru says the same thing. Do not remove the last bathtub in the house. You will tank the resale value. You will scare off families with kids. You will regret it.
Louise Mulholland did it anyway.
The corner jacuzzi in this bathroom was the only tub in the room, and she took it out. She ripped out the boxed-in shower stall sitting next to it. She stripped every bit of beige tile off the walls. What she did not touch was a single wall, the window, or the door. The footprint stayed exactly where it was. The room still comes out looking almost twice as big.
That is the whole trick, and it is worth stealing.
Here is what she walked into
The jacuzzi was the villain. It hogged the whole left wall, which shoved the shower into a cramped corner with silver aluminum rails, which left the vanity with just enough room for a single tiny basin and a flat medicine-cabinet mirror. One bad choice at the start made every other choice in the room worse.
Look closer and the room tells on itself.
The shower chair gives it all away
See the plastic chair inside the stall. That means the giant jacuzzi, the one every renovation blog says to keep, was basically furniture. Nobody filled it. Nobody soaked in it. All the actual bathing happened in a three-foot box with steamed-up glass, a bottle shelf stuck to the wall with suction cups, and a seat the user had to drag in from somewhere. The whole room was built around a feature that had quietly stopped earning its space.
Same bathroom, totally different identity
Same window on the left. Same door. Same walls. But the jacuzzi corner is gone, the aluminum shower box is gone, and the floor is suddenly a thing you can actually see. The new shower runs along the back wall with a single pane of glass holding the water in. One built-in niche replaces three different suction-cup shelves. The whole room exhales.
Put them side by side and the shift is obvious
Same angle. Same window. Same spot the camera was standing in both times. The before is crowded. The after breathes. Nothing was added to the room to make it feel bigger. Things were just taken out.
The vanity wall doubled down
From this angle you see what replaced the tub wall. The shower stretched out sideways into the space the jacuzzi used to hog. The vanity grew a second sink. The mirrors doubled up and started glowing. Even the toilet moved out of the dead center of the room so the eye runs all the way to the back wall without tripping on anything.
Same tight angle, before and after
Same spot, same toilet in the foreground, same vanity on the right wall. The box is gone. The chair is gone. The suction shelves are gone. In their place is one clean pane of glass and a view that runs straight across the room.
Where the hotel feel actually lives
The vanity floats off the wall, and that one choice makes the floor look bigger than it is. The taps come out of the wall instead of the countertop, so the quartz sits clean with nothing poking up out of it. The mirrors light themselves from the back, which means no harsh bar fixture firing straight into your eyes at six in the morning. A heated chrome towel rail replaces the old flat ring. The laundry basket is a woven piece sitting out in the open because it is nice enough to count as decor.
The lesson sitting in the dumpster
A room this calm did not come from more. It came from less. One brave subtraction opened the floor, freed the walls, and gave every other decision in the renovation room to breathe.
The jacuzzi had to go. The rule everyone follows was wrong for this house.
