USVI-On-Line

Joann - Awesome job with the bathroom. I feel inspiration coming on. We're about to (within a year) move the "baby" down the hall to share the jacknjill bath with his sister - I know it will be war in the teen years but I think its good to learn to share and cooperate before you go off to college.

Anyway, that leaves his room with its own bath as our guest (mostly gramma) quarters. I love the direction you went.

Loria --- back to you and your undertaking. Are you near an Ikea? They have great affordable and very space efficient options. Their showroom is awesome for ideas!

We recently paid someone to remodel our master bathroom. It was a complete gut job (down to the studs) and cost $12,000. Our master bathroom is about 14x6 feet. We didn’t skimp on materials and got new everything including the bathtub. We figured out our material cost as we are used to doing house stuff ourselves and the majority of the $12,000 was for labor.

The guy that did the work gave us a pricing sheet claiming about $8000 in materials and $3500 in labor, but when we broke down the actual cost of the materials they were around $3000 if we’d bought the stuff on our own. When we questioned him about the price of the materials he admitted that he takes his cost and doubles or triples it. I think an up-charge on materials is fairly standard when the installer also sells the materials.

If we were to do it over again, we would purchase the materials on our own and pay someone to install them. As I said, we normally do stuff around the house on our own (my husband is quite talented at it) but we just didn’t think we could deal with having our master bathroom out of commission for the length of time it would have taken him to do it while also working full time, because of course we save our vacation time for STJ, not home improvement projects

There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it for less than $14K...I'd get some more quotes if I were you.

Definetly be your own contractor. There's alot of people out of work now that would love to do the job and it will save you alot of money.

Don't skip on electrical or plumbing at all. Make sure that's done right.

I'm excited for you. I had a ball designing and organizing the new Master. Spent many years with just one bathroom and I was thrilled to be able to have my own Master Bedroom and Bath.

Consider the bead board too. So easy to clean and it goes with just about anybodies tastes.

Thanks again all of you--I am trying to get my head around this remodel--like i said the space is just freaky--in the current layout there is what i think is alot of wasted space due to the eaves (well not techincally the eaves, but the roof slants down there so.....)--but i am not sure how to get much use out of that space with out building a dormer (which we cannot do!) --i suppose all this would make more sense to you nice people if i could describe the space properly--maybe i could post 'before' pictures......?

Hi loria,

I remembered a couple sites that I found useful when we looked at tile. These have ideas for different tile patterns, for varying numbers and sizes of tiles. (e.g., all one size, 2 sizes, etc.) Each pattern provides an estimate of the ratios of each size tile needed.

Just in case you decide to go the tile route...

http://www.besttile.com/default.asp?LINKNAME=PATTERNS

http://www.daltileproducts.com/designtools.cfm

chicagoans--those are really helpful sites! thanks!

You're welcome loria! Just one more thing that I found to obsess over. (Like we need that, right?) Have fun and enjoy -- you'll be in that room every day so make it yours!

I love cool funky spaces by the way. Grew up in an old house with plenty of quirks. I read above that your space is narrow. If you can't find a shallow stock cabinet for your vanity, you might be able to find a cool console cabinet (narrow), to use as a vanity. (Cut a hole in the top, add a counter top and a drop in sink.) A friend of mine did this in her vintage city condo and it was great!

One more thing... do you have enough natural light in the room? When we remodeled, we ended up with 2 hall baths for the kids, with no windows. We added something called SolaTubes and they add a ton of natural light! I keep thinking the kids left the lights on, but it's light from the tubes. They were about $750-800 each, installed, and well worth the money if you have a dark space.

chicagoans,
we have lots of light up there (thankfully....) but just checked out solatubes--HOW COOL! how about i fly you out here and you can design this bathroom for me???

loria wrote:how about i fly you out here and you can design this bathroom for me???

Well I love NY, but designing a bathroom on STJ would be more enticing!

chicagoans wrote:

loria wrote:how about i fly you out here and you can design this bathroom for me???

Well I love NY, but designing a bathroom on STJ would be more enticing!

well, it certainly would be! sorry i can't be more help on that front--but i am definitely dreaming!!!