Many thanks to everybody who answered, you have all been very helpful in clarifying my very muddled thoughts. Here is a hopefully clearer description of the situation: The house is a 50's ranch style, with 3 bedrooms and a hall bath (4.5x8.5 ft) clustered on one side of the house, and the kitchen, office/den and another hall bath (4x9 ft) on the other side of the house, with a great room in the middle. We plan to stay in this house as long as we can, but we are in this city for my husband's work, and if something happens (although unlikely with his kind of job), we know we'll have to move somewhere else; therefore, we'd like to make updates to the house while keeping resale in mind. Our (excellent) realtor said that for resale we should have an ensuite. After reading the comments, I have to clarify with him if he thinks a lack of ensuite will narrow down the market significantly, or if we 'simply' would not get the best price for the house. Most houses in the area are old (in the whole city actually), and we saw plenty without ensuites. We saw two of the neighbors' houses, and they did not have ensuites. This is what we considered: 1. Redo the bathrooms with the existing footprint (not that we have room to change anything inside), but we can go far into making them pretty, 2. Add a door from the master bedroom to the hall bath next to it, and close access from the hall. This I think would be a bad idea, not only because the people in the other two bedrooms will have to go across the house to the other bathroom, but also because the master bedroom will end up with windows on two walls, three closets on another, and two doors on the fourth side. Not restful. 3. Add another bathroom next to the master bedroom where the closets are, with one closet door transformed into a bathroom door. This bathroom would be 4.5x12 ft, although it could go to 5x12 if need be (but no more, because we'll hit a big window), which will have a shower but no bathtub. We talked to a professional who said it will fit fine with the caveat that the toilet will likely be the first thing you see in front of the door because of the current clearance requirements. 4. Build an addition. This again I think would be a very bad idea, since it would be blindingly expensive and the house is already on the higher side of square footage for the surrounding area. We will of course fix everything that is broken. The interior doors are the original 50s doors, hollow core dark wood look with lots of scuffs and holes, and they were cut short to fit the now non-existent carpet, so I would qualify changing them as fixing what is broken (and they bug me every time I look at them... ). The windows are a perk; we are still divided on those. I tend toward option 1, while my husband is going for option 3, although he agrees we do not need another bathroom. The reason I feel ill equipped to make this decision is that I'm originally from Europe, and even after so many years here I feel mildly perplexed about the North American love affair with bathrooms. Our previous rental was built in the last ten years and had a huge ensuite which I didn't like. I found it hard to keep as clean as I thought it should be, and it was so large I felt as if I was doing my business in public. Given the bathroom pictures on Houzz, I'm clearly in a minority. Your comments help ensure that I don't miss anything that might otherwise be obvious, so thanks again. And extra thanks to whoever makes it to the end of this post...

Go clean and neutral. We lived for a couple years with 60's mottled yellow tiles on our walls, and a coordinating vanity/med cabinet. Once I had taken the fern wallpaper down and painted it white, luxe white shower curtain, and found just the right hand towel to bring it together it wasn't quite so bad.

How did you resolve this situation or did you leave it as it is? I remember I had a similar situation when I was renting an apartment and saving money to buy a new one and I asked the landlord to fix everything. The landlord fixed everything, but only after a couple of months, which did not suit me very much and I terminated the contract with him. I recently saved up for my apartment and moved to Egypt thanks to Brokereg in the city of Alexandria. And I realized that having your own apartment is much better than a lifetime to rent.

Okay, hold your horses. This idea of removing the tub and reusing the floor tile to fill in where the tub had been has a major flaw. No waterproofing. Your plan only takes into account the pretty surfaces and not the bones that actually make a shower work. When you build a shower, the layers underneath the tile and grout must be waterproof. Grout is not waterproof. A shower is built to account for that and you can actually take a shower in a properly made shower BEFORE the tile and grout go in and you will be fine. If you leave up walls from the 1950s or earlier, you are dealing with tile set into a thick mud base reinforced with wire mesh. Somehow, this system usually did not leak through and get the framing of the walls wet. But once the tub is gone, you are back to bare studs down there. There is no way for you to add tile there and tie it in to the old walls. Your new section where the tub had been will either just leak, will leak at the seam between the old wall and the new area of wall (if you manage to waterproof the new section), or will leak both where this seam is and where the new wall meets the shower floor. The only way to make a waterproof shower is to have a seamless layer of waterproofing using one of several methods from the drain in the shower floor to the top of the tile walls AFTER a professional slopes the shower floor properly. You simply cannot do it the way that you said you want to do it, re-using the floor tiles to make the lower walls. Research waterproofing so you understand a few ways of doing it and you will see what i mean. This is not a quick semi-remodel situation. As pros have tried to tell you, you must gut the tub/shower to make a shower here.