We hate, hate, hate our “master” bathroom. It’s only 8 feet by 5 feet, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s laid out in a pretty inefficient manner, with a space-wasting linen closet and cheap little pre-fab corner shower. From day one it’s been our first planned major demo, and we’re saving money hard with the hopes of completely gutting it in the spring.

Unfortunately, first one door and then the other on the corner shower became almost completely non-functional. When little plastic tabs start breaking off you know it’s bad news. Anyway, we finally had to accept that the doors weren’t going to survive the 4-odd extra months that we needed them for. Neither of us really wanted to switch to the hall shower sooner than necessary, (the main issue being the miserable water pressure in there) so we came up with the idea of taking the doors off of the corner shower and rigging a shower curtain instead. I started looking around online for L-shaped curtain rods, but they all seemed to be in the $60 range! That just seemed silly for something that we only need for 4 months, so we decided to make our own out of PVC. Here’s the door removal:

The pieces are going to live out on the patio with our banished screen door for now:

And there was much scraping of excess caulk to clean things up…

And then we rigged the PVC connectors together, reminded me of playing with Pipeworks as a kid:

We didn’t see anything resembling a flange, so we just bought some end caps and screwed them directly into the wall:

And then everything was attached!

since our shower pan isn’t exactly very deep and we’ll be throwing it out in the spring too, we decided to glue one side of the shower curtain down directly to the wall and the pan, to minimize water escaping. Since there’s that vertical ceiling support, the curtain only opens halfway anyway.

All finished:

While we got the cheapest shower curtain possible, we did make sure it was a 7 foot tall curtain, since we had noticed the 6 foot tall shower doors weren’t stopping some water from spraying over and hitting the bathroom door. (You can actually see a bit of rust around the hinges. boo.)

Anyway, I don’t know if we would have gone this route if we weren’t fairly certain that it’d be a temporary solution. I guess we could have used galvanized pipe and a cool patterned curtain for an “industrial chic” look, but I’m pretty happy with the price for PVC:

• 10′ PVC pipe – $1.68
• PVC connectors – $2.55
• PVC primer/cement- $7.51
• shower curtain – $15
• curtain hooks – $3
• Caulk – $8.49

And we still have leftover PVC and plan to use it and the cement to make some obstacles for Loki since he needs to practice for his agility classes. The caulk will undoubtedly get used again too.