What a Cheap Bathroom Quote Leaves Out

Almost every failed bathroom we are asked to look at failed in the same place, for the same reason, on roughly the same schedule. Water got through the tile — which it always does, because tile and grout are porous — and found nothing behind it doing a job. Six or seven years later there is a stain on the ceiling below and the whole room has to come apart to fix something that cost a few hundred dollars to do properly the first time.

The uncomfortable part is that the homeowner usually could have seen it coming. It was in the estimate, in the form of a line that was not there.

Tile is a finish, not a barrier

This is the single most misunderstood thing about bathrooms. Ceramic and porcelain are dense, but the grout between them is not, and neither is the joint where the wall meets the floor. Water passes through a tiled surface continuously and in small quantities. That is normal and expected.

A shower that lasts is not one where water is kept out of the tile. Five things make that assembly, and leaving any one of them out means the other four do not save you.

Then the pan is flooded, plugged, and left standing overnight before a single tile is set. That flood test is the moment you find out whether any of the above was done properly, and it takes one day.

• A substrate that does not care about water. Cement backer board or a foam board system. Not drywall, not green board, not anything with paper facing on it.
• A bonded membrane, continuous. Sheet or liquid-applied, taken up the walls and across every change of plane. Continuous is the operative word — a membrane with a gap in it is decoration.
• A pre-pan with real fall. The floor is sloped in mortar before the membrane goes on, so water reaching the membrane runs to the drain instead of sitting under the tile.
• A drain bonded into the membrane. A bonding-flange or clamping drain, tied in as one system. A drain that merely sits near the waterproofing is the most common single failure point in the entire room.
• Corners and penetrations sealed. Preformed corners, banded seams, and every valve and mixer body sealed where it passes through the membrane.

The three questions

You do not need to know how to install a membrane. You need to know whether the person quoting you does, and whether they have priced it. Three questions get you there.

Three questions, and the answers tell you more about the quote than the total at the bottom does.

• "What waterproofing system are you using, by name?" A real answer names a product. A vague answer about "waterproof board" or "we seal it up well" is telling you the assembly is whatever happens to be in the van that week.
• "Is the drain bonded to the membrane?" This is the detail that separates people who have been trained on wet rooms from people who tile. If the answer is confident and specific, most of the rest of the job will be too.
• "Do you flood-test the pan before tiling?" One day in a five-week schedule. Anyone who says it is unnecessary is telling you they would rather not know.

Ventilation is not an extractor fan

The second thing missing from cheap bathroom work is a duct that actually goes outside.

A fan is a motor. What matters is where the moisture ends up. An enormous number of houses in this county have a bathroom fan discharging straight into the attic, where the moist air condenses on the underside of the cold roof sheathing every winter night. Over a few seasons that produces exactly the damp, dark, mildew-stained roof deck that homeowners then blame on the roof.

Done properly the fan is ducted in insulated duct, on the shortest run the layout allows, to an exterior wall or a roof cap with a damper. It is not expensive. It is just easy to leave out, because nobody sees it.

The other things that quietly disappear from an estimate

• The permit. Plumbing and electrical work require permits and inspections in New Jersey. Unpermitted work does not stay invisible; it surfaces at closing, as your problem, at the least convenient possible moment.
• The contingency. In a house built between 1900 and 1970 — which is most of them here — the wall is hiding something. A cast-iron stack corroded at the hub, a vent that was never really a vent, mud-set tile on wire lath that takes three times as long to strip as anyone expects. An honest estimate names a contingency. A cheap one discovers it later as a change order.
• The sub-floor. Deflection that was fine under vinyl will crack stone. This is priced before the job or discovered during it.
• Protection and clean-down. Dust containment, floor protection along the route, and daily clean-up are a real labor line. When they are missing from a quote they are also missing from the job, and you will find out which in week one.

What this means for the number

A properly built bathroom in Bergen County generally runs $25,000 to $45,000 for a hall bath and $45,000 to $90,000 for a reconfigured primary bath. When you see a number substantially below that range, the difference is very rarely efficiency. It is the assembly behind the tile, the duct to outside, the permit, and the contingency — the four things you cannot see and will not miss until you do.

We would rather show you the honest number at the start than the cheerful one. See what actually goes into a bathroom renovation, or read how the same principle applies to a kitchen.