A Look Inside A Full Bathroom Remodel With Jeremy
Jeremy has been a Project Manager with LJ’s Handyman Service for roughly two and a half years. He had previously done concrete, HVAC, and underground utilities. Jeremy mentioned that he was drawn to this job specifically because of the freedom. Jeremy enjoys going out to different jobs and getting to work with clients to make their vision come to fruition or to help them create a vision and bring that to fruition. Jeremy said the main thing he continues to learn over time is that “you will never see the full picture until you get in there and start taking things apart.” It’s always a painful proposition for Jeremy to have to go back to the client, once there is a clearer picture of the actual scope of work and have a conversation about what is going to be required to finish the job. Overall, Jeremy believes the most rewarding part of his job is turning over a finished project to the homeowner.
When Jeremy was diving into this project it was clear the layout was… let’s call it “unusual.” There was a stand-up shower in one corner, with the toilet positioned immediately next to it, and it was directly facing the door to the bedroom. The vanity sat in a little nook and there was a makeshift closet with curtains. Safe to say, this was a very unfinished bathroom. The idea was to take the bathroom down to the studs and start from scratch. While the clients didn’t have an exact vision for the bathroom, they knew they wanted to redo the shower tile, the floor tile, reposition the toilet, and enclose the closet.
“You will never see the full picture until you get in there and start taking things apart.”
After attending the site visit, Jeremy sat down and drew the bathroom to scale on graph paper. By widening the shower on both sides and adding a bench, pushing the interior wall out about six to ten inches, and adding another perpendicular wall for the bathroom and bedroom to share, we were able to create a small walk-in closet (with a barn door). Jeremy also moved the vanity to the other side of the partition wall, allowing the toilet to be repositioned to where the vanity was prior. When the clients stamped their approval on the design, Jeremy assisted them while they chose the products they loved for the bathroom (tiles, doors, vanity, toilet, etc.) At this point Jeremy was anticipating a three-to-four-week timeline.
ROADBLOCKS
Once the sections were approved, the fun part, or the “demo” began! Jeremy had two guys working on the demo. Once the demo was completed, a couple of hiccups came to light. In the construction world, this is typical and usually expected. “Expect the unexpected” we guess you could say! The attic fan was not venting to the exterior of the house, but rather straight into the attic; this caused mold to grow on the roof sheeting. Upon discovering this, we sent one of our guys over to perform mold remediation. At that point, we were going to be swapping out the old fan, so we added some ducting to the roof vent and connected it to the fan when that got installed. Jeremy then noticed that there were two heat runs that came up from the crawl space in the wall, turned 90’ degrees and traveled across the ceiling, to feed the bedroom with heat. Unfortunately, when this addition was added, a beam was put in under the wall to separate the bathroom from the bedroom, which then eliminated the heat to bedroom. Jeremy talked to the clients about their options, and they opted to have a mini split system installed. In addition to this, a range hood vent that was traveling through the floor, under the location where the vanity was, into the chase, and out a sidewall was found. It turned out that the range vent had a break in the pipe inside the cavity, so everything that was being vented from the range hood was being sucked into the return air and being distributed throughout the house. At LJ’s we use quite a few subcontractors, so we brought in an HVAC company to consult. That company came out and cut the heat runs (that went nowhere) back to the wall and capped them. We were not able to re-route the range venting, so we had that repaired. We were also not able to enclose the return air venting because of the location of the furnace, in relation to the vent, so we cleaned up the cavity it was using and closed it back up.
Expect the Unexpected
Once we overcame the roadblocks, the show went on. We were able to do framing, have an electrician run the necessary wiring, and a plumber re-run the plumbing for the shower, toilet, and vanity. Next, our drywaller came in and closed the rest of the room. At this point we sent in a few guys to prime and paint the entire bathroom and closet. Our tile guy built the bench and tiled the shower, he was then able to install wire for the in-floor heating and tile over the top of that. Around the time the vanity was installed, we had the countertop subcontractor come in to measure and template the countertop. While waiting for the countertop, we started installing and painting trim, installing the pre-painted barn doors, installing the closet shelving system, carpeting the closet, and trimming out the plumbing and electrical. The countertop subcontractor returned a week or so later to install the countertop.
From start to finish, the entire project took approximately 6 weeks. A good portion of the extra time was due to the unforeseen issues that came up after demo. Some of that time was also spent waiting for the countertops to arrive and get installed. Generally, the work Jeremy anticipated took about how long he thought it would. It was the extra work that he didn’t know about that set the timeline back. LJ’s Handyman Service had about four different people from our own crew there, as well as four different subcontractors.
Jeremy’s favorite part of this project was the design. Jeremy said, “It was a very clean slate to work with and the homeowners didn’t have a lot of information in the beginning about what they wanted. I was basically given a few guidelines and able to design their entire bathroom, as well as assist them in making all their selections around fixtures. Outside of the things that we had no way of knowing, the rest of the job went according to plan and was very smooth. There really wasn’t anything I would have done differently, based on what I knew in the beginning, the timeline was probably pretty accurate. It is always the unforeseen items that push out a project.”
Author: Destiny Garvin
Published: June 18, 2024
