Lou Manfredini's Bath Smarts How to Renovate and Maintain the Smallest Yet Most Essential Room in Your Home

Chapter One So What's the Plan? Designing and renovating a bathroom requires a grand strategy; here's how to devise it. Let me tell you about the last bathroom I ever remodeled in which I quoted a fixed price up front. The project involved a beautiful stucco house with a red-tiled roof, owned by a colleague of my wife. My partner Mike, and I had built a screened-in porch for her the year before, and the homeowner was so pleased with our work, she called us back to redo her bathroom. No problem for us; after all, we like to think of ourselves as full-service renovators. As with all bathrooms we had worked on, we knew this one would involve quite a number of contractors from various trades, from plumbers to electricians, so we diligently figured this in to our contract price of $18,500. Although there was nothing particularly fancy about this project, it did involve stripping the old bathroom down to the studs and starting over, including new fixtures, new tile floors and wainscoting, and even a new window. I had to admit, the bathroom came out like a dream. We even tended to the small details, such as pulling out the large cast-iron radiator that was taking up space and replacing it with cast-iron baseboard heat, which made the room appear bigger. The homeowner was thrilled, so Mike and I packed up our tools and headed home. It wasn't until we started writing checks to pay all those various contractors that we realized we had a problem. We paid the electrician, the plumber, and the tile setter, a nice guy named Phil who did terrific work. Then we discovered that the $18,500 bathroom we had just installed had actually cost $26,300and that Mike and I would be paying the difference. It was then that I formulated my cardinal rule, which holds true to this day: You will exceed your budget on a bathroom renovation, no matter what. Bathroom design is one of the trickiest of all, and not just because the budget is so hard to control. Nowhere else in the house is so much going on in so little square footagefrom sinks and toilets to tubs and showers, and places to store and dry towels and clothes. Even the dirty laundry heaps up in here. Think for a moment of what else the bathroom holds: magazines and books to peruse, in what has become the twenty-first-century "library"; cosmetics and colognes; mirrors, medicine cabinets, wastepaper baskets; spare linens and towels. This room is part attic, part utility room, and all under intensive use. In addition, homeowners now look to the bathroom in the master suite as a place to unwind from the stresses of the day, as if the deteriorated conditions found in the average bathroom wouldn't compound the stresses of the day. On top of it, this is the harshest environment outside the Amazon jungle: It's subjected to daily dousings from steamy water, which makes the entire room humid and damp. Yet we all want everything to feel fresh and look pristine. How do you get that? By going beyond the basics of decorating to focus on the underlying systems and structure that make a bathroom durable. To create a bathroom that feels fresh, that soothes the senses, and that maintains household harmony by providing a place that family members can use efficiently and in close proximity, you have to think about it from top to bottom and then again from bottom to top. This doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune for a full renovation to improve conditions, but you do have to think beyond decor to get to the vital organs of this most vexing of rooms. Let's begin our tour of bathroom renovation by focusing on design basics before we work through the major aspects of renovation in the chapters that follow. Designed to Please Bathing has a long and rather weird history. Back in the days of the ancient Greeks, in the city of Sparta, the iManfredini, Lou is the author of 'Lou Manfredini's Bath Smarts How to Renovate and Maintain the Smallest Yet Most Essential Room in Your Home', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345449900 and ISBN 0345449908.