5 Money Saving Tips for Renovating Your Bathroom
Updating a bathroom can make one of the biggest differences in your home. It doesn’t have to cost as much as you might think! Here’s a break down of what we did on a recent bath remodel and some cost saving tips:
* Keep the plumbing in the same spots. When you start moving where things are, cost starts to skyrocket.
* Keep what you can. We ended up using a special treatment to keep the original tub and tile. This was labor intensive but a huge cost savings. Replacing the tub and tile was our initial plan but when we discovered that the original tile was embedded inches thick in concrete and metal lathe we decided the labor of removal wasn’t worth it. The tile and tub specific paint ended up being a great option.
* Be willing to pivot. Anytime you do renovations be flexible with your plans because unexpected things always come up.
* Plan ahead so you have time to search out the best deals on things like light fixtures, tile, vanity. I do a lot of searching on Amazon for light and plumbing fixtures. For vanities check sales at Wayfair, Overstock, and Amazon. I like to get mirrors at vintage stores or HomeGoods.
* Do NOT get fixated on recreating a specific look. I really wanted to have a similar feel to the bathroom we had done in our guest cottage and so I searched and searched for a similar vanity. It’s important to me to have a quality vanity - I’ve been in too many homes over the years with peeling plastic off of MDF (a composite material) cheap vanities and insisted on solid wood and quartz or marble top. After months of looking, I settled on a high quality one that I like but it was $100’s more than I had wanted to spend. In retrospect, I wish I had started with a high quality vanity on sale that I liked and designed the bathroom around it instead of the other way around.
Final thoughts and a cost breakdown:
Retrofitting an old tub with new plumbing parts is harder than you would think. You will not find them at big box stores. Athens Plumbing and Well Supply is our go to place to find what you need. For the tile and tub treatments to work, you must have spotlessly clean tile or it won’t adhere. My personal bathroom has had this done and is still looking good over a decade later with just a few spots on the tub surround tile where we have scrubbed too hard.
Total work included: removal of tile floor, drywall patching, ceiling light fixture change (re-centered and got rid of vent), vanity light fixture change, updated electrical including new GFCI outlet, “painting” the tile and the tub, new tile floors, new mirror, new vanity, new toilet, new faucets, tub plumbing parts, new closet door and bathroom door and hardware, new paint (twice because I didn’t like the color the first time) and new trim paint, ceiling paint. Total cost was around $2,100 plus probably 60 hours of labor plus my time searching for deals and sourcing everything. The vanity was $900 of that and I think if I had taken the advice above, I could have shaved around $400 off of that.
If you have at least a bit of DIY experience and are willing to watch some YouTube videos, you can most likely update your own bathrooms for thousands of dollars less than a professional.