5 Hidden Costs in Bathroom Renovation
Old Wiring
Now, one of the very first issues that you might encounter in your own bathroom renovation is old wiring. Depending on how old your house is, you may have an outdated style of wiring which is no longer safe to use or is not compatible with the new hardware which you are wanting to install. A lot of jurisdictions code requires that if you uncover old wiring too, you'll have to replace it. So, you need to think through the cost and potential of new wiring potentially all the way back to the breaker box before you begin a bathroom renovation.
One way you can check to see if you'll need new wiring is to open up a junction box in the area in which you'll beworking. Of course, turn off the breaker before you do that. Get one of these little tester pens and run it around on the black wires, all the wires to make sure that there's no power running to that box. Pull your light switch or outlet out and look at the wires which are coming in from behind. If your wires have a light white, cream, gray, or yellow sleeving on them, chances are your wiring is probably just fine. If it's an old kind of silvery or brown color or if it doesn't have any sort of sheathing at all, then you may have to replace quitea lot of wiring when you start opening up walls.
Wrong Drain Lines
Another potential cost is down at the drain line of your your tub or shower. It's very popular nowadays to be deleting the old bathtubs and instead replacing them with new showers. The issue with that is in most places code requires a 2in drain line for showers but only an inch and a half drain line for bathtubs. And so if you're going to convert a bathtub into a shower, you need to make sure that your drain line is appropriately sized. That can sometimes be expensive to replace a drain all the way down to where you .get to the bigger main drain pipe. It could even involve ripping up a good portion of the concrete. In some places, it's easier.
In order to tell what size drain you have, measure the inside diameter of the existing drain pipe. It should be 2in for a shower or an inch and a half for a bathtub. The pipe also is labeled with its size right on the pipe.
Unsuitable Subfloor
A third unforeseen expense can actually be the floor itself. Especially where you're installing your shower or your bathtub, it needs to be perfectly level. If it's not level, you can have big issues with water draining out of the pan. If the the pan is tilted away from the drain, there's potential that water could get stuck traveling that way down the pan instead of towards the drain Additionally, if you're tiling the rest of your floor, you'll want to make sure that that is as flat as possible. Otherwise, you're going to get weird undulations and gaps and unevenness in your tiles. Nobody likes that. So, make sure you either have a flat floor, you self-level it, or you correct any of the framing under your floor, which is causing it to bounce or move while you're walking on it.
Water Damage
Now for a biggie, water damage. There are basically three places in a bathroom where water damage is likely. One is right in the corner of the showers and bathtubs where the water spills over to the side of the shower where there's no waterproofing and gets down into the floor, gets into the walls, causes mold and rotting. The other two places are under the vanity where the valves from the wall drip and nobody tends to catch them because you're not under there very often. And also under the toilet, there is a wax seal under the toilet which connects the toilet to the toilet flange—and that is very common to get installed incorrectly causing leaks and also nasty smells.
Water damage can be a little tricky to plan for. I basically live by a rule. If you see a little bit of water damage, there's probably a lot of water damage. If you don't see any water damage, there's probably a little bit of water damage. Look at the bathtub corners to see if the drywall is damp or dark. Look for soft spots on your floor. Look for discoloration under the toilet or a stinky smell coming from the toilet which you can't seem to clean. And look for soft bottoms of the cabinets under the vanity. Those will be your common telltale signs of water damage.
Old Supply Lines
The last hidden cost is actually the water supply lines in your bathroom. I've had a few cases where we haven't been able to solder to old copper because it was too corroded, too worn out, too thin-walled, and we actually had to rip copper out uh quite a ways back into the house. There's also this type of connection called a shark bite connection, which people use on copper and PEX, and I open up walls all the time to find those leaking. So, just plan for the pipes for the shower or bathtub, the pipes for the toilet supply, and the pipes for the vanity supply. Plan on potentially needing to replace those.
If you have any questions or comments about your bathroom renovation, post one in the comments of this video or shoot me an email at nathan@bankstonconstruction.com.
