Bathroom Remodeling

A bathroom is the only room in a house you deliberately spray with water every day. Everything we do in one comes back to keeping that water where it belongs. The tile is the part you see. The waterproofing behind it is the part that decides whether you are doing this again in eight years.

We take showers back to the studs. Green board is not waterproof — it is water-resistant drywall, and in a shower it fails. We use cement or foam backer board with a bonded liquid membrane over it, or a sheet membrane system, and we flood-test the pan for twenty-four hours before a single tile goes up. If it holds water overnight it will hold water for thirty years.

Plumbing gets updated while the walls are open, because that is the only cheap time to do it. Old galvanized supply lines get replaced with PEX or copper, drain lines get checked for slope and venting, and every fixture gets its own shutoff. A lot of older houses around here have no fixture shutoffs at all, which means a dripping faucet turns into killing water to the entire house.

Ventilation is the second thing people skip and the first thing that grows mold. A 50 CFM fan over a tub is undersized, and a fan ducted into the attic just relocates the moisture somewhere you will not find it until the sheathing rots. We size the fan to the room and duct it through the roof or the gable wall with insulated pipe.

On a full gut, plan on three to four weeks. There is a stretch in the middle — after the tile is set and before it is grouted and sealed — where the room looks finished and is not. We will tell you when that is, so you are not standing there wondering why nobody showed up.