How this job was run Hide the detail
CHALLENGE
Twenty-two hundred square feet taken back to bare slab and block inside, and fifteen working days to put it back — with no electrical and no plumbing changes in the scope. That makes the job harder, not easier: the new work has to land on the rough-in that is already there. The shower gets rebuilt on the existing drain, and every door frame, baseboard return and tile layout has to come out square against openings that stopped being square decades ago.
The bathrooms carry the risk nobody sees. A shower fails behind the tile, months later, where nobody can reach it.
SOLUTION
Demolition first: floors, baseboard, casing, door frames and doors out, ceilings opened, walls back to studs and block, and drywall repaired rather than skimmed over. The services came into view at that point and stayed exactly where they were.
The shower is rebuilt from the framing. Wet walls in USG DUROCK cement board, a 40-mil PVC pan liner formed over a framed curb and carried up the walls, and a liquid membrane rolled over the board — two layers that overlap instead of meeting at a seam. The niche is formed before any of it, because a hole cut into a finished wet wall is a leak with a shelf in it.
Then large-format marble-look porcelain on the shower walls and the master bathroom floor, dry-laid so the veining carries from floor to wall, with exposed edges closed in tile trim profiles rather than left as a cut arris. The second bathroom takes the same material around the tub, up to the ceiling and returned into the window reveal.
The rest is rigid-core click laminate through the bedrooms and living areas, new wood baseboard, casing, door frames, doors and hardware, and Sherwin-Williams Duration on walls and ceilings — painted after the carpentry, so the caulk line at the baseboard is cut once. Outside, the patio floor is coated in high-traffic epoxy.
RESULT
A 2,200-square-foot home taken back to slab and block inside and finished in fifteen working days, with zero accidents. Rigid-core click laminate, two bathrooms in large-format porcelain over a shower waterproofed in cement board, a 40-mil PVC liner and a liquid membrane, new baseboard, casing, frames, doors and hardware, Sherwin-Williams Duration throughout, and a high-traffic epoxy floor on the patio.
Nothing electrical or plumbing moved. A renovation this size usually buys itself room by shifting a wall or a drain; this one had neither option and still closed in fifteen days.
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