Franklin has grown as fast as any town on I-495, and the great majority of its housing went up during that expansion — the subdivisions off King Street, Union Street, and Pond Street through the 1990s and 2000s, with newer building continuing since. Those houses are now old enough that first renovations are underway across the town.
Start with what the builder installed, because that is what most Franklin homeowners are replacing. Shower enclosures in construction of that era were a line item, not a design decision: aluminum surrounding all four sides of the opening, thin glass with perceptible flex, and a track along the bottom. The track is where the frustration lives. It sits full of water after every use, mineral scale builds in the corners, and there comes a point where cleaning it is no longer productive.
Two replacements are worth comparing. Semi-frameless keeps a slim channel where glass meets wall — cheaper, and the track is still gone. Fully frameless has no perimeter at all, uses thicker glass, and lets the tile run uninterrupted. In a primary bath with tile you chose deliberately, the second is usually where the money should go.
Both require the glass to match your opening exactly, since there is no longer a frame to hide behind. Framing does not produce round numbers, and what your shower actually measures is something we determine in the house after tiling, working to 1/16".
The larger Franklin project is the one that changes the room's proportions. Primary baths of this vintage put a soaking tub in a corner platform with a small stall beside it, and reclaiming the platform for the shower is transformative. The resulting footprint is irregular — a returning wall stub, often an angled corner, sometimes a bench — and it gets built as a set of fitted panels rather than a stock unit.
Once a fixed run passes about four feet, specify 1/2" rather than 3/8". Thin glass over a long span holds a faint curve, and a wide door feels better on heavier glass.
For white marble or light porcelain, low-iron glass eliminates the green tint that shows at the cut edges of ordinary tempered glass. Franklin finishes run mostly to brushed nickel and matte black, with brushed brass turning up in fuller renovations.
Our Needham showroom at 33 Highland Ave is 21 miles away, roughly half an hour via I-495 and Route 128.
Everything is done by Oasis employees — the measurement, the fabrication in our own Massachusetts facility, and the installation. Nothing is subcontracted, and the quote does not move.
