Last Friday was bulk trash and you should all know by now that my life revolves around bulk trash day. Oh how I miss the last town we lived in where you could put bulk out once a week and have as many trash cans as you wanted. In my current town you can only put out one trash can a week and everything else has to be collected at the once a week bulk trash pick-up. Bummer for a DIYer like myself. Anyway… I have been hating on the shower doors in the guest bathroom and master bathroom for pretty much ever. They’re the ugly plexiglass and shiny metal sliders where all that dirty water gets stuck in the tracks and is such a pain to clean. Yea those. So with hubby being away last week, while I was home on spring break with the kids, all heck broke loose. Not really, but Thursday morning while still in my PJs, and as Smart Jr cooked waffles (not toasted, but used the waffle iron) for her brother and sister I decided to pull out the shower doors. Yup.
Here’s what it looked like before.
The first thing I did was score the caulk with a utility knife (a sharp blade is your best friend!) all the way around both sides.
I was too impatient to get the doors free from the track, so I just started whacking at the top piece with a hammer. First I hammered in toward the shower, which was dumb, so then I stood inside the shower and hammer at each corner again. This time pushing the top piece and both doors out into the bathroom. I carried it outside as one unit, then slipped the doors off and took all 3 pieces to the curb. Then I unscrewed the side pieces from the tile wall. 
The side pieces came out quickly and I brought them to the curb too. The bottom piece was not screwed on, it was glued. I used a chisel to pry underneath it and was able to hammer it off. Feel free to wear better foot wear if you attempt this project. Underneath the bottom track looked like this.
I started working on this area first and then worked on the walls. Ultimately I removed the caulk where the tile meets the shower basin too, because it was looking old and yucky. But I will re-caulk this area, of course. 
And this is what it looked like after breakfast.
Now if only I could decide on a shower curtain!!!
Updates on the guest bathroom can be found here:
-
Guest Bathroom 2 – Removing the Original Sink and Vanity
-
Guest Bathroom 3 – Shower Demo a One-Woman Job
-
Guest Bathroom 4 – Plumbing, Design Choices and More Demo
I got rid of mine.. first project EVER and it was worth it. But in our town they only have bulk pick up 2x a year! Yes EVERY SIX MONTHS and you are limited to as much trash as you can contain in a 2×3 foot section of sidewalk. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?? Needless to say, it took me weeks to get rid of those doors, since I broke them up into small pieces that would fit in the trash can over the course of multiple pick ups.
#firstworldproblem 😉
Can’t wait to see what curtain goes up.. but even ‘naked’ it looks better!
Six months!!?? That’s crazy!!! I think I forgot to even mention in the post that the doors were gone within an hour. Someone must have grabbed them for scrap metal. I totally should have taken them down a long time ago. I ended up buying a shower curtain. I’m trying to cut down on my DIY projects. Hahaha.
I loathe those sliding doors. Always full of icky stuff. I really hate them in tubs because you cannot sit back and relax and read a book in the tub without a horrible claustrophobic feeling. You exercised such restraint by not smashing them to &%$#! When my mom bought her stuck in 1969 house, that was the first thing I removed and it only took about 15 minutes, including giving the tub a good scrub, scrapping away the left over silicone, hanging a curtain rod and installing a nice shower curtain.
Thanks for sharing. I feel kinda dumb now for not taking the doors off right away. In my defense, that shower gets used less than once a month and I don’t think I’ve ever taken a shower in there. But maybe I will now that it’s got a nice new shower curtain. 😉 The scary thing is I still have these doors on the shower stall in the master bathroom. Yuck! I’ve got to get those off too. At least we didn’t have any on our bathtub. I agree that is the worst! Thanks for stopping by my blog!
Do you find that water escapes the shower curtain since there is no tub? I’m hesitant because of that.
No it didn’t as long as the curtain stays inside the shower pan
Do you have problems when using this shower that water gets on the floor? We have a shower like this in our master and I want to remove the doors but my husband thinks water will get all over the floor!
It was never an issue!