Years ago my husband and I stayed in a lovely hotel in a little town in Tuscany. One of the hotel’s many charms was the bathroom, which managed to be old-fashioned and new-fangled all at once. (You know those Italians when it comes to design!) The light fixtures, the sink and the faucets were all state-of-the-art, but what we liked the most was the shower door, a sheet of clear glass with no hardware. It was stationary, affixed directly to the tub without a metal track, and only went half the tub’s length, but somehow it did the job.  It felt almost like you were showering out of doors, yet it kept the water safely inside the tub.

Flash forward to our renovation of the upstairs hall bathroom, used by our son and the occasional houseguest, in our Washington, DC, brick Colonial. The small space was cramped, but we chose to keep the tub since it was the only one in the house; the master bath had just a shower. A glass-enclosed shower would add to the feeling of space, but we hated the metal slider tracks that were commonly used along the tub edge, seeing them as magnets for dirt and grime. 

We recalled “the Italian solution” and considered installing a trackless shower door. An interior designer friend said, “Great idea, go for it,” but our contractor, a seasoned pro who we trusted with everything except the last word, shook his head. “No way, you’ll flood your bathroom every time you take a shower,” he said with conviction. 

But we had seen it with our own eyes; it worked in Italy, why not here? Despite Richard’s answer-- that the tub’s proportions must have been different there-- we searched the Internet until we found a door that matched our memories.

Once installed, it looked as good as we’d hoped, but the sad truth was inescapable: water, water everywhere. We warned guests in advance to roll up a towel and put it at the end of the door to absorb the water, and they always apologized profusely after causing a flood. Our son, by then a no-nonsense teenager, flatly refused to set foot in it and only used the shower in the master bathroom.

How did Richard know it was a bad idea when he had never even seen the product before? I’m guessing it was his years of experience on the job, the same ones that allowed him to correctly eyeball a space down to a sixteenth of an inch without using a ruler. 

Lessons Learned:

   1. Sometimes the guy with the hammer and nails knows more than the
      one with the design degree.
   2. For bathroom and kitchen renovations, how it works is much more
       important than how it looks.