A well-built home provides value, functionality, and comfort to its occupants. As you spend a lot of your time indoors, it’s crucial to create a living space that’ll provide for your needs and make your stay fun and worthwhile. To design an excellent living space, you’ll have to start with one of its key areas: the bathroom.
Your bathroom can be many places—a location for personal hygiene, grooming, isolation, and self-intimacy. A poorly designed bathroom can make a massive disadvantage to your daily living experience. If you have existing problems, plan to update its design, add more functionality, make it more reliable, or increase its value, it’s worth looking into the idea of bathroom renovation.
With these in mind, here are four essential tips you should know before starting your bathroom renovation project:
1. Hire The Best Professionals
A bathroom renovation is a challenging project that can’t be performed using DIY or do-it-yourself solutions. If you’re planning to renovate your bathroom, you should immediately think of hiring the right people to do it. The timeline of a bathroom renovation project involves different specialty work, so each smaller project should be supervised by a certified professional.
When choosing a bathroom renovation contractor, take experience, reviews, and costs into account. Preferably, find high-rated professionals within your area according to the recommendations of relatives, friends, and neighbors, like the Easy Renovation Company or other reliable bathroom renovation professionals.
Here are the stages of a bathroom renovation project that requires different types of building professionals:
- Plumbing work and rough carpentry;
- Electrical work;
- Insulation;
- Tile and flooring installation;
- Drywall and mudding; and,
- Bathroom fixture installation.
Regardless of your project’s potential labor and workforce costs, never settle for subpar quality and DIY work.
2. Know The Costs and Define Your Budget
Renovating the bathroom is believed to be the second most expensive remodeling project in a household. Before shelling out any amount for a home project, you should always have a big picture of its costs first, and even better if you can achieve more estimated costs.
According to Home Advisor, bathroom remodels have an average cost of USD$10,768, but keep in mind that these factors may affect your own remodel costs:
- Bathroom size;
- Modifying the existing floor plan;
- Regional pricing differences;
- Quality and cost of materials; and,
- Appliances, fixtures, and finishes to add.
For a clearer picture of the remodel costs, here’s a breakdown of various bathroom elements from an entire remodel budget and their typical costs:
- Vanity and hardware (10% to 30%): USD$300 to USD$3,800;
- Plumbing and faucets (12% to 16%): USD$250 to USD$1,450;
- Showers (5% to 25%): USD$300 to USD$3,000;
- Fixtures (10% to 20%): USD$200 to USD$1,800;
- Flooring (10% to 15%): USD$200 to USD$1,350; and,
- Lighting (5% to 7%): USD$100 to USD$400.
Also, knowing your bathroom renovation costs will help you decide if you can afford an all-out bathroom remodel or prefer separating the project into smaller parts while trying to save up some cash.
To estimate the costs of your bathroom remodel, you can ask your renovation contractor for a quote according to your desired specifications and details. Ideally, you should allow some leeway from the estimated costs to cover any unexpected or miscalculated expenses.
3. Find Ways To Save On The Project
Since bathroom remodels can drain your pocket, it’s crucial to find ways to save on the project while still getting the most value from it. Also, if your bathroom renovation is an emergency due to structural issues, you may not have time to save up for the project.
Therefore, here are a few ways on how to make your bathroom renovation more affordable:
- Be more flexible with your options by choosing affordable alternatives, like opting for stock fixtures than customized ones;
- Don’t change the layout of your bathroom, as this would mean additional plumbing work;
- Prioritize functional improvements over aesthetics;
- Purchase your own building materials instead of your contractor;
- Perform a little bit of DIY, but only for the easier aspects of the remodel and those that are cheaper to fix in case your DIY work fails; and,
- Refinish some bathroom elements that you can still refinish instead of completely changing them up.
4. Choose The Right Building Materials
Unbeknownst to many homeowners, the choice of building materials on a renovation project is crucial to its end product. Since your bathroom will be used every day and is susceptible to wear and tear, the fixtures and components should be made of durable, high-quality building materials. After all, investing in high-quality resources will give back your money’s worth.
When choosing bathroom building materials, prioritize these three characteristics:
- Heat resistant material such as ceramic tile, quartz, natural stone, granite, and marble;
- Moisture-resistant options like stone tile, ceramic tile, vinyl, laminate, concrete;
- Items that require very little maintenance ranging from large tiles with thin grout lines, porcelain tile, to back-painted glass.
Additionally, make sure to avoid these materials inappropriate for bathrooms:
- Hardwood;
- Thin laminate;
- Slippery tiles;
- Wallpaper; and,
- Carpeting.
Bottom Line
And there you have it! While every homeowner’s circumstances may be different when planning to renovate their bathrooms, these tips can guide you in starting your own renovation project. Undoubtedly, investing in your bathroom renovation project is one of the wisest ways to spend your money for increasing the value of your home, and most importantly, getting the best return for your investment.
After your bathroom renovation project, your next focus should now be directed towards maintaining and taking care of it.