Preparing your home for sale is challenging. If you need to sell your home quickly and want to get top dollar, you should hire a home stager to help you remove clutter and personal things. They can also identify each room’s key selling features and help you rearrange furniture to create a feeling of spaciousness.

Kitchens Features That Sell

It is unlikely you can change the basic layout of your kitchen. You can however, show off its best features by dressing them up to enhance the overall feeling of the room. You might be surprised by a few of them but the list is based on running my handyman business for 8 years.

• Replace counter tops to update the kitchen. One home owner who did this said “… now I love my kitchen so maybe I don’t need to move.” A less expensive alternative is adding a pleasing back splash that wows buyers.
• Change hardware to update cabinets that are in good condition. You can also replace cabinet and drawer fronts if the current style is dated but in good shape.
• Replace light fixtures and/or windows to add light or maybe you can change the window coverings to let more light in.
• Frequently realtors recommend new appliances, i.e. stainless changes the look and feel quickly. There are reasonably priced packages which include a refrigerator, stove, dishwasher and microwave.
• Flooring is another feature that creates the mood of the kitchen. Consider replacing if your current flooring is worn and dated and the rest of the kitchen is in much better shape.
• A fresh coat of paint (don’t forget the ceiling) is popular. Home stagers offer color consultations to help you identify the best colors for your kitchen based on current trends.
• Routine maintenance items should be taken care of. Repair leaky faucets and drawers/doors that are difficult to open and close. Replace grout that is crumbling and re-caulk the back-splash if it does not sparkle.
• Create a feeling of  spaciousness by removing clutter from surfaces, drawers, cabinets and the pantry so when buyers inspect them they feel like you have boundless storage.
• Make sure the room looks and smells clean. Wash appliances and cabinets, counter-tops, sinks and faucets. Don’t forget the garbage areas and remove all evidence of pets.

Make Your Bathrooms Sell

After kitchens, bathrooms are the next most important rooms to sell a house. They need many of the same touches as your kitchen, only on a smaller scale.

• Assess your fixtures and update those most dated. Faucets should be clean and shiny, along with all other metals from light fixtures to the sink and bathtub/shower.
• Add lighting with a new fixture, or possibly a new medicine cabinet with built in lighting.
• A fresh coat of paint and coordinated towels, hung on updated towel rods/hooks are inexpensive ways to give the room a new look.
• Routine maintenance items should be taken care of. Repair/replace caulking around the sinks and tub/shower,  repair/replace grout as needed and repair/replace leaky fixtures.
• Clean everything so it sparkles, It’s a small room with lots of features that you don’t ordinarily clean – toilets, sinks, faucet hardware, mirrors, soap dishes, etc and keep towels, shower curtains and bath mats clean.

Setting the Mood for Buying

Once you’ve dealt with the bigger projects and you are ready to list your home, you’ll want to create the right mood for buying. Here are some ideas to help you complete the task:

• Light rooms up by opening drapes and blinds during the day and turn on all lights for evening showings.
• Clear the hallways, stairs and closets of all clutter. Every buyer wants lots of storage.
• Arrange furniture to create a spacious look and clean/organize closets, storage, etc to create visual space.
• Make sure your home is warm or cool according to the season.
• Ensure carpets and floors are always clean.
• Make sure the house smells nice with potpourri or fresh flowers around the house.

Good luck selling your home!

Unfortunately there isn’t a right or wrong answer to having a bathtub in your master bathroom. This article explores various opinions about keeping or letting go of the bathtub in a master bathroom dialog online, to help  you make your own decision.

What Folks are Saying About Master Bathrooms and Bathtubs

The web is an incredible place where people can share opinions about anything, and readers get to pick what to read although at times it can be challenging to find the best information on your specific question or topic. Here is just a sampling of what people have said about keeping or letting go of a bathtub in the master bathroom.

What an amazing experiment as I obviously have my personal opinion on this topic or I wouldn’t be writing about it. I learned quite a few things here so the quick summary:

• Every home needs one bathtub for children, i.e. you might have overnight guests.
• There appear to be regional differences, i.e. California likes showers and the southeast wants a master bathtub. The best advice was to check out your neighborhood and be consistent with your competition.
• While bathtubs help sell a home, an aging population needs wheelchair accessible showers so … make your shower (size and entrance) support a wheelchair and turn this into a feature that sells your home, versus worrying about the missing bathtub.

Charly in Canberra, Austrailia said “… a large, easy to access shower is also great for young children when you want to get in there with them. This is especially helpful when you’re small and trying to maneuver around the kids and all the paraphernalia for fun and getting clean.”

• Make your decision based on how long you expect to be in your home, i.e. for 5 or more years, do what you want. If you move every few years, don’t invest in home improvements that might not help sell your home.

Thanks to Zillow.com for some of the ideas shared here, with the question: Is eliminating the tub in the master bath, for a large shower a good or bad idea?

The same is true when laying tile. It might be a little more work to put down 8 feet of tile versus 4 feet but the hardest part is measuring and cutting tiles along edges and corners, so you’re not saving much with a smaller room. That’s why you want to consider what you’re trying to accomplish with tile and see if you can achieve the same results with fewer tiles.

Basic Tile Tips for Any Project

There’s a balancing act between minimizing the number of tiles you need to cut, and getting the best finished look. You should lay out enough tiles so you can see how they’ll look once they’re installed. The best designs start at the center of the room where someone’s eyes will look when they enter a room but that means cutting tiles that butt up to walls on both sides.

It’s also critical to prepare the surface on which the tiles will be installed. This is essential for every tile floor as tiles will crack when weight is applied and the underlying support isn’t even. Might seem obvious but with my handyman business, I’ve had to repair tile spanning both concrete and plywood subfloors around a fireplace and in one home, we had to add lolly columns in the basement to stop the floors flexing between the entry hallway and the kitchen.

Always buy more tile than you think you’ll need. My preference is to calculate the square footage needed, then add 10% contingency and round up to a full box. This should cover minor errors in measuring, bad tile cuts that have to be redone and enough tile for minor repairs a few years down the road when one/more tiles crack. It’s much cheaper than having to research and find a boutique tile manufacturer who’s minimum charge might exceed $100 plus shipping.

Tips for Picking Successful Tile Projects

Our goal isn’t to provide step-by-step instructions on how to install tile. There are plenty of videos online and if you’ve found some you like, please share your favorites with others by leaving a comment below. We want to help you pick the right project for your skill level and available hours to complete the project in a reasonable amount of time. Many homeowners skip this important step and end up hating their bathroom or worse, believe they can’t become DIYs after living with an unfinished project for months or years.

When investing in cabinets, counter tops and tile, natural or neutral colors work best. They’re easier to update with some towels, a shower curtain and a coat of paint. Remember the challenge of dealing with the pink and gray tile that was popular in the ’50s. If you are living with that pink, you might get enjoy the tips at RetroRenovation.com.

Bathroom Tile Projects
Bathroom Floor Tips Pick a larger tile as they’re easier to cut, and there will be fewer to measure and cut. Avoid diagonal designs which require more cuts – save that for your next tile floor when you’ve got more experience. Practice your cuts on the least visible wall behind the toilet.
Bathtub/Shower Surround Do your research and don’t skip steps to make the walls behind the tile water tight. Save on cuts by stopping tiles below the ceiling, i.e. around 6 ft. Remember the design rule for starting to lay your tile at the center, working out vertically and horizontally.
Tile Walls in a Bathroom Tile walls dress up a bathroom but there’s a lot of square feet in a small wall. Adding a tile chair rail creates the feeling of tile, for less time and money. Using different paint colors above and below, the tile gives more emphasis to the tile.
A Splash of Tile Around the Sink Add just a hint of tile with a backsplash around the kitchen sink. Mix and match textures – porcelain sink, granite counter top and tile backsplash. Use natural or neutral colors that are ageless, so you can easily change the look of your bathroom with a new paint color.

We’re all so busy that often the only quiet place we can sit undisturbed is the bathroom! Go ahead and laugh out loud (in social media parlance, LOL). We can laugh together and the best part is no one will hear us, nor does anyone really care what you do in the bathroom unless they’re waiting to get in but most homes have more than one bathroom today.

How Many Bathrooms Do We Need?

At any point in time we only need one bathroom, or more specifically one toilet. We certainly wouldn’t want to clean the 35 bathrooms in the White House, or maintain (they had a flood in 2009) one of the 2 zero gravity toilets on the space station which have 412 basic parts each.

In the 1950s, the average home was 983 square feet with one bathroom. People got in line to use the bathroom, something few of us can imagine today. Houses have since doubled (or more) to almost 2400 square feet and we now have 2 or 2.5 bathrooms for the average home. The number and size of new McMansions is declining but with 5, 6 and more bedrooms and significantly more square footage than your average home, they will continue to have 3 or more bathrooms so the question is … how are people using these bathrooms?

Chart from StantonHomes.com (US Census data)

How Are We Using Our Bathrooms?

Bathrooms are taking on many new identities, beyond a few quiet minutes to read the newspaper or chat on the phone with a friend. The concept of your bathroom becoming a private oasis away from the daily hustle and bustle is taking shape in one/more of the following:

• Private spa with soaking tub, steam shower and other features to help you relax and it’s the relaxing part that we all might have a hard time understanding but suppose you had this hidden space away from the kids, the clutter and only you and your significant other used the room? Well maybe a massage therapist could be invited in once in a while?
• Personal gym with your favorite sports equipment plus flat screen TV and surround music system. Of course if you’re going to do all this, I expect you’ll also need a personal trainer that comes to your house?
• At home beauty salon so you can enjoy the time you spend applying makeup, getting dressed and picking out the right accessories for today’s outfit. There are home professionals for every need so when you’ve got the time and space, you can find makeup artists and hair dressers who will come to your home for some extra pampering.
• Private den where you can read without interruption with your own music and total isolation from the surrounding world, including others in your home.

Obviously these ideas refer to the master bathroom. Using your bathroom for other activities makes lots of sense, similar to the evolution of our kitchens for much more than food. You don’t have to limit your bathroom space to only the mundane aspects of living? Why not add another 30 minutes a day for relaxing and make expand your home to encompass those dreams of what you’ll do when you have more time or take a vacation. A bathroom spa or sports gym  is simply another form of staycation that you can enjoy all year long.

We’d love to hear about your bathroom dreams and get photos to share too!

PS National Bathroom Reading month is June and haven’t been able to pin down a specific week.

We spend a lot of time in our bathrooms. Master bathrooms are becoming  retreats where we can relax after a long day at work. It makes sense to transform our bathrooms into places that soothe and inspire us.

We’re creatures of habit so our homes look similar to those in the neighborhood, whether built last year, 20 or 100 years ago. Like most people I expect to sell my home some day, so I’m cautious about the changes I make … except for paint colors as it’s relatively easy to paint one/more rooms when it’s time to sell.

Why Sexy Bathrooms?

People spend so much time in the bathroom, why not make it fun? If you’re bathroom is a retreat, think about the things you do in the bathroom and decorate accordingly. If you spend hours putting on makeup, jewelry and general pampering, then surround yourself with the perfect backdrop for inspiration.

Yes, maybe I’m also trying to make the topic of homes a little more interesting so you’ll remember to visit us again. After your work environment which you can’t change, you spend more waking hours at home so why not make it your dream home?

Sexy sells and this video is perfect, showing how a shopping mall in Portugal created a memorable experience that will keep people coming back for years to come. The Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH has also transformed their bathrooms into a memorable experience. There’s one community sink (above right) and it’s round so it can be shared by all — another story for another day. Hope you enjoyed the video and here are just a few photos for inspiration … crystals in a bathroom? Want to get more ideas? Google “sexy toilets” or “sexy bathrooms” and then in the left column, click “Images” as Google tags photos uploaded anywhere online.

Photo credits go to …

• Bathroom fixtures with Swarovski Crystals, www.vitruvit.net
• Red vanity and mirror, www.macral.com
• Warm & cozy pink bathroom, www.ehomedesign.blogspot.com

What are your favorite, sexy bathroom ideas?

Remodeling a bathroom must address similar needs when adding space or moving the plumbing. The cost of a bathroom remodel goes up significantly when walls, doors and/or plumbing get moved so the benefits need to outweigh the added cost.

As home sizes get smaller, bathrooms may be scaled back a little but there’s more focus on getting added function in less space. For example, a relatively new concept is the body-bath convenience center, which adds more storage in the form of cabinets and shelves between 2 bathroom sinks.

Scope of Bathroom Remodels

Your existing bathroom, its size and features along with new requirements, will determine the scope of your bathroom renovation.

• Least expensive is updating your bathroom with new fixtures while maintaining the existing floor layout.
• More expensive is a remodel that works within the existing space but involves moving a window, wall or door to make the bathroom more usable and visually appealing.
• The most expensive type of bathroom remodel involves adding space from an adjacent closet or bedroom. This type of remodel will typically include moving one/more bathroom fixtures like the bathtub or adding a shower.

The Bathroom Remodeling Design Process

The process of identifying your requirements and priorities gives you the opportunity to get to know your prospective remodeling contractor. There needs to be open communication. You want to work with someone who listens and offers not just answers but alternatives, with the opportunity for you to participate in decisions. Here are the steps to creating a solid bathroom design.

• Reviewing what you like, don’t like and what’s missing in your current bathroom.
• Determining project scope in terms of floor space and changes to walls or plumbing.
• Prioritizing requirements for the new bathroom.
• Evaluating product/material alternatives and making decisions to fit within your budget.
• Drawing up a design to reflect product choices and providing you with floor plans and 3D visual presentations.

Your Bathroom Proposal

Once you’ve approved the design, your remodeler should provide detailed plans and specifications for all products, materials and work to be completed. There should be enough detail (in writing) to insure there are no surprises during the project. Once the contract is signed, change orders should be used to communicate new project costs, with appropriate sign-offs required.

• You should know all the different contractors who will be involved in the project, and exactly what they will be doing.
• Electrical and plumbing quotes should detail out what fixtures are being provided and who’s supplying what.
• Carpentry details should include work being done, both visible and added structural support for any changes in placement of the bathtub/shower. Materials should be listed including their resistance to water damage and termites, i.e. you want greenboard drywall in your bathroom where the paper is water resistant.
• Tile is one of the largest costs in a bathroom remodel, especially when you plan to tile the tub and/or shower surrounds. If tile selection is not complete, the type (porcelain, stone, marble, etc) and size of the tile should be clearly documented. Details like the height of the tile and borders should also be spelled out.
• Cabinets and accessories should be listed or an allowance included so you understand the total project cost.
• A projected timeline should be provided so you can plan accordingly.

It’s natural to take time to review the proposal and clarify any outstanding questions. Once you accept the proposal, you should receive a project schedule outlining work hours, daily procedures and when you’ll receive project status reports. When the bathroom renovation is completed, a walkthrough should be scheduled to explain how to operate new fixtures and recommended maintenance.

Good luck with your upcoming bathroom renovation. With proper planning and the right team in place, you should have a positive experience and enjoy your new bathroom for many years.

When you spend more time in your bathroom, that means you’ll need features to store more gadgets and don’t forget a refrigerator to keep some cool drinks on hand. Wondering how you’ll relax? Flat screen TVs are becoming a popular bathroom item along with sound systems so you don’t get bored while soaking or enjoying a brisk shower. Whether you want an in-home spa or work-out gym, check these features out.

Large, Spacious Showers

Bathrooms are getting larger and so are showers, to create the feeling that you’re at a spa. Stall showers are out and glass is immensely popular with hinged glass doors to create lots of visual space. Homeowners are spending more time at home and want luxury in their bathrooms where they’re spending more time.

To achieve this look, full and partial shower walls are coming down and some homeowners are adopting the European tradition of turning the entire tile bathroom into a shower. These shower rooms need careful implementation to drain properly with a floor that slopes to a central drain.

While you might be tempted to get rid of the bathtub you never use, you should consider it’s importance when selling the house. If your home has 3 or more bedrooms, then you need at least 1 bathtub for children. It might be acceptable to remove a bathtub in the master bathroom but only if you have a tub in a second, shared bathroom.

Soaking Tubs

When have time for a relaxing bath, you’re really soaking and might not enjoy the noise of the Jacuzzi jets. Soaking tubs are an old tradition starting with hot mineral springs. They’re deeper than traditional bathtubs and often insulated to retain heat. These tubs are not surrounded by decking like sunken tubs in the ’80s and ’90s, which proved challenging when entering and leaving the tub.

Steam Baths and Saunas

Another spa feature moving into the home is the steam bath or sauna, which offers another way to relax and release the day’s stress. This type of investment is significant so you’ll want to take time planning this bathroom feature and a good book is Hot Tubs, Saunas & Steam Baths: A Guide to Planning and Designing your Home Health Spa

Bathroom Entertainment Features

Flat screen TVs are becoming a popular bathroom feature, so you can soak and be entertained at the same time. Sound systems and small, beverage size refrigerators offer the opportunity to remain cocooned for longer. You can even get speakers in the shower now with Kohler’s sound tile speakers. What will they think of next?

Doors on the Water Closet

When you’re spending more time in the bathroom, and sharing it with someone else, placing the toilet in a separate room makes a lot of sense. You may be able to move the toilet or at least add a wall for privacy, with a door if there’s enough room for it to open and close without impacting movement in the room.

Smart Storage

The traditional medicine cabinet is still around with added features like electrical outlets for an electric toothbrush, shaver or curling iron. Bathroom storage is different than most other rooms where you have lots of small items so small drawers with dividers are popular. Storage can be built into the walls and vertical storage towers are becoming popular, starting at the counter top and going up, making things easy to reach. The best storage solutions help organize things while hiding the clutter when not in use.

Heat in Unexpected Places

Heated towel racks are a nice treat when stepping out of the soaking tub. Even better is radiant electric heat in the floors with a thermostat on the wall. You’ll find many more heated bathroom accessories at HeatedBathroom.com, including fogless mirrors and heated toilet seats.

Green Bathroom Products

As homeowners focus on green homes, there’s a lot of interest in on-demand water heaters. First you’ll want to make sure your heated floor is on a timer to prevent wasting energy. There are low-flow toilets to reduce water use and newer hot water heaters work almost instantaneously, providing more efficient hot water when it’s needed.

When I learned about bathsimple.com, a website that simplifies the process of picking out the majority of your bathroom purchases, I had to check out their website and you should too!

A New Remodeling Concept

Many bathroom updates start with a new coat of paint and towels, for under $1,000. Costs quickly increase when you don’t plan ahead so the best advice is write down the estimated cost of your bathroom renovations … before starting. Include contingency of 10 to 20% as there are costs you can’t predict like one of my handyman customers who needed a new window because she’d ignored a leak for years.

Here’s a quick overview of the design process offered by bathsimple.com. For fun, I used one of my bathrooms where I’d like to reclaim the space taken up by an over sized jacuzzi bathtub. It’s great for giving our chocolate labrador baths but no one has used the tub in 4 years.

Designing the bathroom was straight forward, following these steps:

• Identifed type of bathroom being remodeled – powder room, full bath or master bath and here I picked the master bathroom.
• A good idea is picking your budget up front – choices included standard, premium or luxury and I picked standard
• My challenge was bathroom style as I’m rather eclectic. Choices included classic, transitional or modern. At first I picked modern but realized “classic” vanity choices made more sense, to maintain consistency with the rest of the house, i.e. built-in vanity cabinets.
• From several designs, I picked bathroom vignette for the built-in vanity. Up popped the design below, along with a shopping cart full of recommended items and very important, a price tag of $14,776 (about $4,000 cheaper than the modern style, standard budget design).

Customizing the Recommended Bathroom Design

The website recommended working through tabs on the left but not sure I like the order, i.e. I’d rather pick my vanity and wall colors first and then find a complimentary floor color. I removed the crown molding but found the design looked better with a chair rail, something I wouldn’t normally select. Here are the changes made, resulting in an additional $1,500 – I would recommend keeping track on an item basis when you have a tight budget.

• Removed crown molding which I saw right away in photo above.
• Changed light fixtures to see if they’d change in the design (yes) but now I think they’re wider than the mirrors so more tweaking needed here.
• Changed floor tile color (darker) and shower surround (darker). Wasn’t able to add matching tub surround, to either go with the tub surround (what I would have picked) or floor tile.

Why Bathroom Remodeling Solution Works

Most homeowners don’t realize the complexity involved in even small, partial bathroom remodels. bathsimple.com offers a solution that addresses the 2 biggest problems encountered during every bathroom remodel.

• Shopping in multiple locations means you don’t see all fixtures together until installed. When you buy things over months, it’s difficult to return something that’s been installed or more than a year old. At bathsimple.com you get to audition everything before ordering … although you should go to a store to confirm the shape and finishes of the products you’re ordering.
• For large fixtures like bathtubs, showers and even toilets, the odds of getting damaged items is high, i.e. exceeding 50%. With my handyman business, we recommend buying items through a plumbing supply company or ask customers toget these items as we’ve wasted too much time repacking & returning damaged products. We’ve had more success with web based businesses which pack items better … and the bonus here is everything comes together.
• Product quality is excellent, i.e. Hansgrohe faucets are the only ones I use personally.
• Love that you pack up your old bathroom fixtures and bathsimple.com handles recycling for you.

Obviously bathsimple.com has limitations. For now it appears they’re a great solution when you’re buying a few fixtures to renovations  that fit within your existing walls. You can partner with a handyman or remodeler who can provide wall measurements when these are changing, and that way you can include labor costs too.

Wishing you much success with your bathroom remodeling project. Would love for you to share your experiences here, and especially those involving bathsimple.com (who I have no relationship with but know they’ve got a great solution).

My role was overall project manager and I focused on getting materials to the job site to keep everyone on schedule. Where I worried about the alignment of the plumbing for the new vanity, our decorator focused on the best hardware to dress up the vanity and overall bathroom. Here’s my first tip for you – take photos of different sections of a room you’re decorating. You’ll be able to focus on the details better.

Making Your New Bathroom Pop

The guest bathroom shown here included a tile floor and new vanity, while we reused the toilet and tub to save money. We also didn’t have a lot of time so most of our products we selected from what local stores had in stock. What I want to highlight here is how simple additions to basic products made the design really sparkle. I would also suggest that you work with an interior decorator if only on the initial design, and maybe a review at the end of your project. You’ll be glad you did.

Look at the bathroom vanity in the center photo. The vanity is a piece of furniture versus the traditional cabinet with a straight base and while I’ve heard how kitchen cabinets are moving in this direction, I had no idea how big an impact it makes. Who really looks at your vanity below the countertop? What I love is the arch over the floor, the way the hardware pops as if each piece has a picture frame around it and with the matching toilet paper holder, it all comes together perfectly.

Now bump up to the top of the vanity, the mirror and the light fixture. They’re all earthy tones so they pull together nicely with good contract against the white. Notice how the hand towel softens the hard surface of the countertop. This bathroom looks much more inviting when pulled together, I can’t imagine remodeling a bathroom again without considering these added touches from the beginning.

Bathroom Decorating Tips

We always say “if I had to do it over, these are the changes I would make” so here are my lessons learned to help you with your remodeling projects.

• Shop online for bulky items as your local selection is limited to a few basic pieces, i.e. we might have had 3 to 5 vanity choices in white. Make sure to include shipping costs in your comparison of products, i.e. one of the local box stores charged for shipping while most online retail prices include shipping. Online retailers also pack their products much better to avoid returns.
• When remodeling, look at high end decorating magazines for ideas as they set the trends. Then shop around for the style you want at the price you can afford, as you’ll find similar designs in a wide range of prices. Not every new trend will succeed so pick a design that has more classic lines so it looks fresh for many years.
• Include decorating touches like the shower curtain and towels in your initial design layout. It will show you see how the colors compliment each other and help you finalize color choices, i.e. the paint color is critical.

In fact we didn’t consider how many fixtures this small bathroom had when the owner said they wanted to go with bronze hardware which costs about fifty percent more chrome hardware. Want to learn how many different products you have to buy for a small bathroom?

How Many Bathroom Fixtures are There?

Let’s start at the back of this bathroom, with the bathtub. We were not able to get the twenty year old chrome nice and shiny so the new owner decided we should replace everything with bronze hardware. Here’s the list of materials for the bathtub:

• We used the existing porcelain bathtub which was in good shape.
• We replaced the shower head, water control fixture, water spigot, drain lever and drain cover (total of 5 pieces) plus a new curtain rod.
• We used the existing toilet but replace the lever used to flush … bringing the total to 6 pieces of hardware.
• We purchased a new vanity but it came with white hardware. This meant we had to buy new door and drawer hardware in bronze, so we’ll count these as “1 logical group” and that brings our count up to 7 pieces of hardware.
• In addition to the new vanity, counter top plus a new sink and new faucet bringing our hardware total to 8 pieces.
• Above the new sink went a white oval mirror plus a new light fixture, in bronze.
• Oops, we’re not done yet. We also had to buy a bronze toilet paper holder plus 2 towel bars for a total of … 12 pieces of bronze hardware!

No one realizes that changing one piece of bathroom hardware might mean changing 12 pieces of hardware. The tough part was adding this cost to the budget after we had installed the new tile floor and wainscotting. Fortunately everything else … oops, everything except repainting the room after the owner saw the original paint color, fell within the original budget (vanity, counter top, sink, mirror and lights, ceiling fan/light combo.

Remodeling Takes a Team

When we realized how many design decisions needed to be made, we recommended adding an interior decorator to the project. Our customer, a busy business owner agreed to this suggestion and it made it possible to stick to the customers schedule of renovating 2 bathrooms, flooring and a punch list of minor projects.

Jennifer Myers got the project off to a quick start by pulling together a color design with tile, paint color recommendations, a vanity color and hardware to meet the customer’s goals. My Handyman had overall project management responsibility and coordinated all other contractors for the project plus flooring working with B & C Floor Store.