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One outdated tub and a cramped stall shower just became a single walk-in bathroom that took over the internet.
Mr. Build It, the DIY creator behind a steady stream of home renovation videos, dropped “Building a GIANT Shower (Home Remodel)” on January 17, 2020, and the 17-minute walkthrough quickly became one of his most-shared projects. Rather than a quick cosmetic refresh, the video documents a full teardown of an existing bathroom — bathtub and standalone shower stall both gone — to make room for one oversized walk-in enclosure. It’s the kind of demolition-to-finish build that DIY audiences eat up, complete with plumbing decisions that sparked their own conversation once the video spread.
- Mr. Build It demolishes both the old bathtub and the outdated, cramped shower stall down to the framing and subfloor, merging their footprints into one expanded walk-in shower.
- The rebuild required tying the plumbing from two separate fixtures into a single new drain line, along with pouring a fresh pan pre-slope and waterproofing the whole enclosure before tile went up.
- Published January 17, 2020, the video went viral fast, picked up by outlets including LADbible in late January, with online discussion centering on the drain sizing and venting needed to combine two fixtures into one.
Two Fixtures Come Out at Once
The project starts with the unglamorous part: gutting an entire bathroom section. Mr. Build It rips out the bathtub and the small, boxed-in shower stall next to it, stripping the space down to bare framing and subfloor. That’s the detail that separates this from a typical refresh video — there’s no tiling over existing surfaces or working around fixtures still in place. Everything in that footprint comes out so the two spaces can become one.
For viewers used to seeing painted grout lines or a swapped shower head pass as a “makeover,” the scale of this demo is what made the video stand out. It’s closer in spirit to the kind of structural work covered in removing a load-bearing wall than a weekend touch-up — framing exposed, subfloor visible, decisions made about where the new walls of the enclosure will actually sit.
Plumbing Rethought for a Doubled Drain
Combining a tub and a separate shower stall into one giant shower means combining their plumbing too. The video walks through rerouting and tying the old tub drain and the old shower drain into a single new drain line sized for the larger enclosure — not simply capping one line and reusing the other. That reconfiguration is exactly what caught the attention of plumbing-minded viewers once the clip started circulating.
Turning two separate fixtures into one massive walk-in shower means the drain, the slope, and the venting all have to be rebuilt from scratch — not just relocated.
That’s the technical debate the video kicked off in DIY and home improvement circles: whether a single drain sized for a much larger pan, and the venting behind it, was handled correctly for a shower footprint that big. It’s a legitimate point of discussion for anyone attempting a similar merge, and it’s part of why the build got passed around well beyond Mr. Build It’s usual audience.
Building the Pan and Waterproofing the Enclosure
Once the drain line is set, the video moves into the pan pre-slope — the mortar bed that directs water toward the new drain across a footprint roughly double the size of either original fixture. From there it’s waterproofing membrane across the framing before any tile goes up, the step that keeps a shower this large from turning into a leak behind the walls a year later.
The finish work is full-height tile across the entire enclosure, not a partial surround, which is part of what gives the finished shower its oversized, luxury feel. Viewers looking for the same finishing logic on a different surface can see similar prep-then-finish sequencing in a project like installing epoxy floors across a 2,000-square-foot home — different material, same idea of getting the substrate right before anything decorative goes down.
A DIY Video That Found a Bigger Audience
What started as a straightforward upload on Mr. Build It’s channel turned into a viral moment within days. Outlets like LADbible featured the remodel in late January 2020, pushing the video far past the creator’s usual subscriber base and into general home improvement chatter online. The draw wasn’t just the size of the finished shower — it was watching a full structural remodel, drain reconfiguration and all, laid out step by step in under 20 minutes.
The plumbing debate that followed the video — drain sizing, venting, whether one line can really handle what used to be two fixtures’ worth of water — is still the thing DIY forums bring up whenever someone posts about knocking out a tub to build a bigger shower. That’s the argument this one video kicked off, and it hasn’t really settled.
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