Interior
Bathroom Remodeling
Waterproofing, fall and ventilation get settled first, so the freestanding tub and the double vanity are sitting on a room that is still sound in fifteen years.
Chapter 01
Waterproofing is the whole job.
A beautiful bathroom built over a membrane detail nobody checked is a beautiful bathroom with a short life. Substrate, membrane, fall to the drain and the shower kerb get worked out before a single tile is chosen, because none of that is visible once the room is finished, and none of it is fixable without taking the room apart again.
This is the part of a bathroom remodel that never shows up in a photograph and is the reason the room either lasts or does not. We treat it as the first decision, not a step that happens on the way to picking tile.
Primary bathroom remodel by Avid Builders with a freestanding tub and a walnut double vanity
Ventilation, in a Minnesota winter.
A bathroom that cannot dry out in February is a bathroom growing something behind the tile. Extraction gets sized to the room and ducted straight to the outside, never dumped into a roof space where the moisture just relocates.
That matters more here than it would somewhere warmer. Long heating-season months mean a bathroom in a Twin Cities house spends most of the year with the windows shut, so the fan is doing all of the drying, not the weather.
Chapter 03
Fitting a primary suite into the footprint you have.
Where the tub can go, whether a wet room beats a shower tray, and what a double vanity costs you in circulation space are all decisions about the same footprint pulling in different directions. We work them together rather than picking fixtures first and discovering the door will not clear the vanity.
A freestanding tub reads as the centerpiece in a photograph, but it also takes floor space that a shower or a second run of storage could use instead, so it only goes in when the room can actually spare it.
Tile, stone and the things that date.
Setting out starts from the most visible corner of the room, not the least visible one, so any cut tile ends up out of the sightline rather than framing the doorway. That single decision, made before the first tile is set, is most of what separates a room that looks planned from one that looks patched together.
Finishes get chosen for how they read in ten years, not just how they read in the showroom. A pale walnut vanity and clean stone tones age differently than a trend finish does, which is part of why the primary bath we photograph most is still the one we would build again today.
After handover.
Silicone joints and grout are the two things worth watching in the years after a remodel. Both are maintenance, not defects, and both are cheap to keep ahead of if someone tells you what to look for.
We tell you what to watch at the kerb specifically, since that is the joint doing the most work in the room, holding water in on one side and keeping it off the floor on the other.
Avid Builders — Twenty years of Twin Cities remodels. Call (952) 513-7375.