One-day bathroom remodel: what to expect, hour by hour

The install date is on the calendar in the kitchen, the consultant measured your master shower three weeks ago, and you still don't quite believe it. Your sister's bathroom in Loveland took six weeks. This post runs the day with the clock on it, from your chair, so you know what to expect from a one-day bathroom remodel before the truck pulls in.

One thing before we start. The one-day job is the wet area: the tub or shower, its walls and its fixtures, gutted to the studs and rebuilt. If your job also includes the floor, the vanity or the toilet, it runs longer, and your consultant told you how long when you signed. The clock below is for the wet area. Times are close to what our crews run in most houses; your project coordinator gives you the schedule for yours.

The week before your one-day remodel

The walls, base and trim for your shower come from the numbers the consultant took in your bathroom, and the fabricator builds them to those numbers before install day. That is the whole reason the day works. Nothing gets measured and cut on your floor. Your project coordinator confirms the date and the arrival window with you a few days ahead.

Your part takes about twenty minutes. Empty the shelves in the tub area and move anything on the vanity you don't want dust on. The old sliding door and its track leave with the tub, so there is no need to save them. Pull the bath mat and anything else off the floor between the door and the tub, and put the cat somewhere with a closed door. The shower area goes out of service as soon as the crew walks in, so if the hall bath is the one being done, the morning showers happen in the master.

7:45 to 8:30: the walkthrough

The crew that pulls up is the crew that measured. They know which side the tub is on and where the valve sits. An adult needs to be home at the start of the day and again at the end; the hours in between are yours.

The lead installer walks the path from the front door to the bathroom with you and lays down floor protection along it, then hangs a dust barrier across the bathroom doorway. Water to that bathroom goes off. In most houses that means the shutoff for the bathroom; where the house has no local shutoff, the main goes off for part of the morning while the crew gets to the valve, and the lead installer tells you before it does. Then the day starts.

8:30 to 10:30: demo to the studs

This is the loud part. The sliding door comes off first, then the tile and whatever is behind it, then the tub. A cast-iron tub in a 1968 ranch is too heavy to carry out whole through a hallway, so the crew breaks it in place with a sledge and carries it out in pieces. You will hear that for a few minutes from the kitchen.

By mid-morning the shower area is open to the studs: no tile, no wall surface, no tub, the drain and the supply lines visible. We wrote about what our crews find behind the tile in a 1960s Cincinnati bathroom, and this is the point in the day where all of it shows up.

The old tub, the tile and the wet board go out to the truck or the trailer. None of it sits in your driveway overnight.

10:30 to noon: subfloor, framing and plumbing checks

Once the area is open, the lead installer looks at three things: the subfloor under where the tub sat, the framing behind where the tile was, and the pipes. In a house from the 1960s through the 1990s around here, the common finds are a damp patch of subfloor by the drain, dark drywall or plaster behind the bottom rows of tile, and a galvanized supply line or a valve older than the one your consultant expected.

The crew handles what they find that morning, and the lead installer shows you, if you want to see, before it gets covered. Ask your consultant before install day how that work is treated in your written quote. The answer belongs in your contract.

Then the plumbing. The crew sets the new shower valve (the valve is the part in the wall that mixes hot and cold; the handle you see is the trim) and sets the drain for the new base. If the new base puts the drain somewhere other than where the old tub's was, the crew moves it now.

Noon to 2:30: substrate and base

The wall surface needs something flat and sound behind it. The crew puts up the prepared substrate over the studs, the panel the solid-surface walls attach to, and sets the new base level on the subfloor. If you ordered the low-threshold base or the one with the built-in seat, this is when you first see it in the room instead of in a photo.

2:30 to 4:30: walls, trim, door

The walls go up in the afternoon, back wall first, then the two sides, fitted to the numbers from the consultation. Seams sit in the corners, so the long back wall you look at from the doorway is one piece. The niche or the corner shelves you picked go in with the walls. Then the trim pieces, then the valve trim and the shower head, then the door track or the hinged door, then the caulk at the corners and along the base.

The caulk is the reason the shower sits empty tonight. Common 100% silicone kitchen-and-bath sealants list a 24-hour cure at room temperature on their data sheets (GE's Supreme Silicone sheet is one example), and a cold bathroom in November stretches that. We don't shower in it the day we build it, and neither do you.

4:30 to 6: cleanup, walkthrough, warranty

The dust barrier comes down last. The crew cleans the bathroom, then rolls up the floor protection and vacuums the path back to the front door. The hallway at 5 o'clock looks like the hallway at 7:45, with a new shower at the end of it.

The lead installer walks you through the shower: how the valve works, how the door latches, and the care routine, which is mild soap and water, with no abrasive pads and no harsh cleaners. They leave the written care instructions on the vanity and register your lifetime warranty before they go. The warranty covers the product and the work for as long as you own the home, and if something is wrong in year six, you call one number.

The shower is in by evening. You take your first shower in it the next morning.

If your house has only one bathroom

In a 1920s Tudor in Hyde Park with one bathroom upstairs, the thing to plan around is the toilet. It stays in place and stays usable through the day; the crew works around it, and the water to it comes back on as soon as the valve work is done. Plan on a neighbor's or a family member's shower that one evening, or skip a night.

If you are selling the house soon

A 1994 two-story in West Chester that goes on the market in the spring doesn't have a month to spare with the master bath torn up. One day of a dust barrier, and the agent can photograph the bathroom that weekend. Tell the buyer they are getting a shower with nothing to regrout; the warranty stays with you, so leave it out of the listing.

The first week with your new shower

Day two, you shower, and the caulk has set. Sometime in that first week your project coordinator checks in to ask whether anything isn't right. If it isn't, we make it right, which is the line on our website and the one your coordinator works by.

How to schedule a one-day bathroom remodel

The day above starts with a consultant in your bathroom with a tape measure, and that visit is free. They measure the tub or shower area, go through the colors and patterns with you (most of our customers land on the marble or travertine looks), and leave you a written quote. With promotional financing, qualified buyers get the shower area gutted to the studs and rebuilt, walls, base, fixtures and the lifetime warranty, for as low as $150 a month, or 12 months no interest on approved credit. Get the shower now and pay later; the financing page has the current terms.

Call (513) 657-3750, or send us your address and a good time, and we'll come measure. The one-day remodel page has the rest of the process from first visit to install day.

One-day shower replacement in Cincinnati puts the whole job in one place: what it covers, what it doesn't, and how to judge a bid.