Planning a bathroom remodel: the plumbing decisions that come first

People usually start a bathroom remodel with the part that is fun: tile, a vanity, the shower they saw somewhere. That is a perfectly good place to start dreaming and a bad place to start planning, because a handful of decisions underneath the finishes determine what is cheap, what is expensive, and what is not really possible without opening the floor.

Decision one: is anything moving?

Keeping fixtures roughly where they already are is dramatically simpler than moving them, and the toilet is the strictest of the three. Drains rely on gravity and need a consistent fall to work, so moving a toilet even a short distance can mean opening the floor and re routing the waste line. Sinks are more forgiving. Swapping a tub for a shower in the same footprint is usually very manageable, and the drain position is the thing that decides it.

None of that means do not move anything. It means find out what moving it involves before you fall in love with the layout, because that is the number that changes the budget most.

Decision two: what does the wall have to hold?

Wall hung basins, wall mounted faucets, floating vanities and grab bars all need real backing inside the wall, and that backing has to go in while the wall is open. It is trivial then and a genuine nuisance afterwards. The same applies to a bench in a tiled shower and to a niche: both are framing decisions, not tiling decisions.

This is the single most common thing we get asked to retrofit, and it is the one most worth deciding early even if you are not certain yet. Blocking behind a wall costs almost nothing while the studs are exposed.

Decision three: how much hot water does the room need?

A big soaking tub, a shower with a rain head plus body sprays, or a second bathroom where there was not one before all change the demand on your water heater. It is much better to work that out at the planning stage than to finish a beautiful room and discover it empties the tank. Sometimes the answer is a bigger tank, sometimes tankless, and sometimes the existing heater is fine and you have saved yourself a purchase.

Decision four: plan for the person using it

A good share of our remodel work is making a bathroom genuinely usable for whoever is in it: walk in tubs with barrier free access doors, roll in showers, fold down seats, grab bars that are properly anchored rather than screwed into tile and hope. If there is any chance you will want those in the next decade, the cheap moment to prepare for them is now, while the wall is open.

A sensible running order

• Agree the layout, and specifically which fixtures move and which do not.
• Choose the actual fixtures, because their rough in dimensions drive the pipework.
• Rough in the plumbing, and put in every piece of backing and blocking now.
• Close up, waterproof, then tile.
• Set the fixtures and trim.
• Snag it properly, with the water running, before the trades leave.

The reason fixtures come before pipework is that a faucet and a shower valve have specific rough in requirements. Choosing them after the walls are closed is how people end up with a valve at slightly the wrong height forever.

Two things we will not do for you

We will not tell you what permits or inspections your particular project needs, because that depends on your municipality and your specific scope, and an answer in a blog post is worth nothing to you. Ask us about your job and we will tell you what applies. We also will not quote a bathroom off a photograph, because the number would be fiction.

What we do

Full kitchen and bathroom remodels, additions, new bathroom builds and fixture updates, residential and commercial. We work with Delta, Kohler and AO Smith, plus InSinkErator disposals and Water-Right conditioning where the job calls for it. Depending on the project we can complete our services within one day, and where a job will run longer, you will know that before we start rather than after.

Our labor and the parts we use are warrantied for one year after the work is finished. Estimates are free. As one customer wrote to us: you took all my plumbing worries and made them seem easy. That is the job.