Remodeling Strategies for the Bathroom
Our approach to remodeling a bathroom is probably far too practical for the people who see their bathroom as a retreat. These are the true "bathroom people" who want a luxurious room with elaborate plumbing fixtures and furnishings. Where they see the bathroom as a personal sanctuary, we see it as a public room for all the members of the household.We've never added a whirlpool tub or pulsating waterfall shower room, but we've spent plenty of money buying good quality, basic white porcelain fixtures in half a dozen old houses that we've owned.

While most of the old bathrooms functioned well enough, they were inconvenient. Washing your hands in a sink with separate hot and cold water spigots was motivation enough to spur us on to remodel. Another thing we found annoyingly lacking was that older bathrooms don't have enough electrical outlets. Where do you plug in hair blowers, curling irons, toothbrushes, and shavers when there's only one 2-prong outlet?

Many of the bathrooms we remodeled were in older houses that had already been remodeled in the fifties by a former owner. We actually found these to be less functional and appealing because they were modernized with white and gold speckled particleboard or an inexpensive plywood vanity not to our liking.

We see the bathroom as the workhorse of the house, a room requiring durable surfaces and quality fixtures that are easy to clean. It should also have plenty of storage for towels and sundries and upgraded lighting and ventilation.

When It's the Only Bathroom in the House

Remodeling a bathroom project, however so humble, requires more planning per square foot than any other room. Because it's so small, you can't have a team of workers in there. Everything has to be done in sequence so a gameplan is definitely in order.

The worst case scenario is when the only bathroom in the house requires a major makeover. Translated that means - no toilet, no shower, no running water For often several days when pipes are rerouted and replaced. If the job runs into a snag, the lack of facilities may drag on for days. All family members should be prepared for considerable inconvenience, like going without showers for a few days and using a Port A Potty. A family of campers can handle anything, but for those of us who have to have a morning shower, it's not a pleasant time. We try to schedule the work of removing and replacing fixtures so it all happens in one day, but Murphy's Law often intervenes. One busted water pipe behind the wall and the best laid plans are history. The bottom line on scheduling major work in a one bathroom household is: schedule the project around your neighbor's vacation time and water their plants and feed their pets in payment for using their bathroom.

Checking It Out

When we appraise a bathroom, we try to work within the existing floor plan because we've learned the cost of ONE bathroom makeover skyrockets as soon as the toilet, bathtub or sink are moved from their original locations. Moving the plumbing around is a major project that we try to avoid. Our most successful bathroom remakes have not involved rebuilding everything. Most of the time we are able to modernize the bath by replacing the old toilet and vanity and upgrading the floor. But, before we do anything we check out the existing fixtures.

No matter if it's footed or built-in, the bathtub is the largest fixture in the room so we usually begin there. Unless it is in bad shape with deep rust stains and chipped porcelain, we keep it.

In all cases, we'd add a shower to a tub that doesn't have one, because it's a simple project to replace the old tub valves with a new single-handle combination tub shower valve and run a new pipe up the wall for a shower head.

If the walls in the tub enclosure are damaged by moisture we'd plan to replace the old plaster or drywall with cement board, (a waterproof cement and fiber mesh underpayment) and then install ceramic tile on top of it. If the walls are sound and covered with ceramic tile, we'd leave them be because of tile's durability.

If the walls were covered with plastic tile, a popular low-cost alternative to ceramic tile in the '50s, we'd replace them. They are easy to get off the wall but the mastic is difficult to remove. For a quick fix we'd paint them, but only for a temporary solution to cover up a ghastly color.

When we came upon an old toilet with a wall hung tank from the '20s we'd replace it with a water-conserving toilet. These old toilets take up a lot of room and consumes too much water. The job depends on its roughing in dimensions, which is the distance from the bolts that hold the toilet to the floor and the waste pipe to the finished wall. New toilets are designed to have the bolts placed 12 in. from the finished wall. Some older toilets have a 12 1/2 - 13 inch roughing in dimension. This isn't a problem, it just means the new toilet will sit a couple of inches from the wall, so we place a block of wood on the wall behind the tank for support.

If the bath has the original toilet, chances are it still has a matching wall-hung lavatory. The main reason we replace this old fixture with a new sink top and vanity is because it has separate hot and cold water valves. The new sink and vanity provides additional storage along with the convenience of a single-spigot valve.

Old wall hung or pedestal sinks may have their hot and cold water supply and drain lines come out of the wall very close to the bottom of the sink. We always measure the location of these pipes and check them against the back of the vanity we plan to purchase to make sure the pipes coming out of the wall fit under the new vanity.

If the bathroom already has a vanity, then we check out the condition of the base cabinet, countertop and plumbing fixtures. Unless they are in better than average condition, we replace them with a unit that has drawers and shelves for concealed storage. Some old medicine cabinets are charming, but most are just plain small so we replace them with a larger, recessed unit that incorporates lighting.

Our first choice for flooring is ceramic tile because it's a durable hardworking surface that's easy to clean.

Another less expensive alternative is a piece of vinyl sheet flooring. Because the bathroom floor is small, we sometimes were able to buy a remnant of a high-priced piece of seamless vinyl flooring for a bargain price.

Whatever the flooring material we decided to use, we have to provide a good solid subfloor to install the new floor on. In one bathroom, the old floor didn't look too bad until we tore it up to find a leaking toilet had rotted the subfloor. We had to cut out the bad areas are replace them with new plywood. Every floor man we have ever talked to told us that if the subfloor isn't sound, the floor will eventually fail no matter what we used.

Jobs We Do Ourselves

We've done a lot of work in a bathroom that doesn't require the talents of a licensed plumber. Painting and hanging wallpaper are two good examples. Working in a bathroom can be a challenge because of its tight quarters. Getting wallpaper on the wall behind a toilet or radiator can require the agility of a contortionists. Removing it from tight spots is even more difficult.

Sometimes we've been able to reuse parts of the original bathroom. For example, We've cut down a Corian(am) countertop and sink to fit a smaller vanity using a carbide-tipped saw blade and reused plain wall hung mirrors.

In a small bathroom where every inch mattered, we took the plain chrome wall-hung medicine cabinet off the wall and cut a hole into the wall. By installing the cabinet in the wall cavity over the vanity, it looked built-in.

In many older homes, we've found a window in the bathtub area and it always needs repair work. Because of the damp conditions, the window sill and lower sash are usually rotted out or in bad shape. If the bathroom was in for a total overall, we'd consider removing the window and making it a wall. But in one case, everything else in the room was in good shape so we repaired the window and gave it two coats of an alkyd-base enamel paint. That simple repair did a lot to improve the overall look of the room.

Structurally sound ceramic tile can be rejuvenated with new grout and caulk with amazing results. This is a tedious job, but not a mind bender that involves removing the old grout and caulk, cleaning up the tiles and then applying new grout to all the joints.

Most small-scale carpentry work we do ourselves. In a long, narrow bathroom we created a linen closet by simply framing in the 2-foot deep space behind the door. We hung shelves and Louvre doors for floor-to-ceiling storage.

In one house we had a bathroom requiring more grunt work than money. The fixtures were sound, but whoever did the work didn't quite complete the project because there was wallpaper on the walls, but no molding or trim work. They hung the wallpaper and called it quits. When we tried to remove the wallpaper, we found the paper facing of the wallboard came off with it because it hadn't been primed and sealed before the wallpaper was hung. We ended up spending hours resurfacing the wallboard with drywall compound and then sealing and priming it.

If the electrical circuits to the bath are not ground fault protected, we'd upgrade them with GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupters) receptacles for protection against electrical shocks. These devices are required in bathrooms to meet building code standards.

Jobs We Hire Out

When a bathtub is stained and pitted and beyond repair, but the ceramic walls around it are in good shape, it's a tough call. It's a difficult and expensive proposition to remove an old cast iron tub weighing in at several hundred pounds without disturbing the walls. This is a job we'd leave to a plumbing contractor who specializes in remodeling work, because it involves removing a few rows of the bottom tile, then carefully removing the old tub and installing a new one and then resetting the tile. Definitely a job for a pro.

We'd definitely hire an electrician to run new service with ground fault protection to a bathroom for additional lighting and ventilation. We'd follow him up and hook up the fixtures ourselves.

Most building departments allow homeowners to work on their own property as long as the proper building permit and bonding is obtained. When completed, the work must be inspected and approved by their department. That includes rough-in plumbing work for a typical 3-fixture (bathtub, toilet, vanity sink) bathroom.

It's possible for a homeowner with plumbing experience to do rough plumbing, but we'd caution someone without that experience to tackle this project. Saving 65% of what a plumber charges is tempting, but let him do the under the floor and behind the walls work that involves running new lines, hooking up traps and valves and running drainage, waste, and vent lines to existing drain lines and then tying them together.

Concentrate your efforts on the detail work of finishing the bathroom. You can hang and finish the wallboard, install all the new fixtures, and hook them up.

Written by the editors of HouseNet
Copyright HouseNet, Inc.

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