What to do when your bathroom is being renovated?
Remodeling the bathroom increases the value of a home, and adding beautiful fixtures and luxurious materials can be exciting. However, since this room is one of the most heavily used in most homes, the process also poses some inconvenience. Here are ways to reduce stress during a bathroom renovation.
Create Your Backup Plan
Whether you are renovating your only bathroom in the home or one of two or more, it will create some inconvenience. Consider setting up a portable camping toilet and camping shower in a private space elsewhere in the home. This way you can avoid emergency bathroom runs to the neighbors or a public toilet.
Staging Materials
A renovation project moves faster when everything that might be needed has already been purchased and placed close to the bathroom. This includes all building materials, tools, protective gear and cleaning supplies. Place items that will be used most or used first closest to the work site. Remember to keep a path clear for easy movement to and from the bathroom.
Handling Dust
Dust is inevitable during all renovation projects, but if you prepare for it, you can keep it confined to the bathroom. Hang plastic sheeting over the doorway and use a canvas drop cloth on the floor. While you could use plastic sheeting on the floor instead of cloth, it is too slick and hazardous. Canvas also traps dust better so that it is not tracked all over the house.
When your renovation includes beautiful new granite countertops, cover them as well. A little dust won’t hurt these durable countertops, but covering them will during renovation cuts down your cleaning and sealing time post-renovation.
If the bathroom has a window, keep it open and put a fan in it blowing outward to exhaust dust outside. In addition, keep dust out of your home’s ductwork and HVAC system by covering the room’s registers or vents.
Allow Extra Time
Projects often take more time than imagined. Instead of trying to squeeze the renovation into a short weekend, assume it will take several days longer. You can avoid stress by not making plans to have house guests or other at-home events near the renovation period.
The time
In an ideal world, you’d align your bathroom improvement with something like a family holiday, entrusting a spare set of keys to the tradespeople carrying out the works. Then it’s just a week under the hot sun before returning, tanned and refreshed, to find a stunning new bathroom. But if you can’t manage to be out of the house for the entire renovation period, try to pick a time when the work will impact the least on your home life. As an obvious example, avoiding getting the work done when you have friends or extended family coming to stay for a weekend!
The work around
Good communication with your tradespeople is key to a successful bathroom renovation. Since no tradesman wants to make your life difficult, let them know well in advance about any times in the week that you desperately need running water and electricity. For example, if you work from home Wednesdays, or your kids come home from rugby practice all muddy every Friday, chances are they’ll be able to schedule around those commitments.
The toilet
Now we’re getting to the really important bit. Perhaps the chief concern of all homeowners is how long the humble, yet essential, toilet will be out of action. You’ll be pleased to know that it’s actually a legal requirement for every home to always be left with a working toilet, so don’t worry about getting caught short! If you’re just replacing the old fixtures and fittings, it’s unlikely that the toilet will be unusable for any longer than a few hours.
The shower and bath:
Once you’ve had the ‘toilet’ conversation you’re likely to next turn your focus towards how long you will be without a bath or shower. The answer is much the same in the sense that it depends on the size of the overall project. The easy part is to take out a shower or bath and replace with anew one, but you also need to account for the time it takes to tile, grout and seal the relevant areas. It’s important to follow the advice of your contractor – if they tell you not to use the bath or shower for a specific period of time while the sealant is drying out then follow the advice. Don’t look for shortcuts in the name of convenience as you could end up causing more damage.
Choose your tradesman carefully:
Delays to any project are always a source of great frustration and inconvenience, and even more so when it’s the functioning of your only bathroom which is held up. If you don’t have a spare bathroom to make use of, then you’ll want the job completed in the shortest timeframe as possible and with as few hiccups as possible. To help guard against unexpected delays, you’ll need to properly check out your chosen contractor. If he/she has been referred to you via a trusted friend or colleague, then that will provide some comfort, likewise online reviews and testimonials can usually give a thorough insight into a tradesman’s reliability and performance standards.
Stay with friends or family
Our closest family is 2.5 hours away, so that wasn’t an option. But, some close friends in the area offered us a place to stay if we needed it. While we stayed in our house through most of the renovation, it was nice to have the option when we were planning on tiling the floor. After all, there was no way the toilet would make it back on the floor after only six hours during that production. I know that staying with other people can be a little hectic and crazy, especially during a renovation. But, I find that if you cook dinner and clean up after yourself, people are always happy to have you. We’re the kind of people that always lend a helping hand when people need it, and our friends are the same way. Knowing that makes asking for help a little easier.
Make a budget
Tackle Your Crumbling Renovation with these easy tips, plus a free printable! Pin to save this helpful post and come back to print your printable anytime!Okay, this may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people just hit the hardware store without doing their research first. If this process is intimidating to you, make sure you check out my post on creating a renovation budget in an emergency.
We started out with a budget of $3,300 for our bathroom, since we knew there would probably be some structural surprises (like leveling the floor) that aren’t typical in a bathroom update. Since we did all the work ourselves, so far we have stayed below that number, but we still have a few more small projects, so we’ll see how we end up. If nothing else, creating a budget helps account for any surprises you might encounter along the way.