Taking a bath

The primary bathroom in my house has never been a welcoming space. Small, dark, poky and grody; shower stall, toilet, vanity. Since I moved in eight years ago, I’ve used it about five times—the first night, then the first two days after each knee replacement surgery, when I couldn’t manage getting into the tub/shower in the hall bathroom.

But I decided that I need to have a walk-in shower option, because reasons, so I’ve started the process of finding someone to get ‘er done.

(I started out in January with the notion that it would cost maybe $5K, since it’s a small room. Then I had a look at some remodeling projects on Reddit and upped my estimate to $20K.)

What I’m looking for is a more comfortable shower space (other units in my development have expanded the square footprint to a rectangular one), with glass doors, better lighting, a new vanity and replacing the really disgusting (built with the house in 1970) medicine cabinet with a larger one over the vanity. At first I thought I could keep the floor, then I noticed how really badly the tiles had been laid. Here’s the space:

One of the two companies that responded so far (the third didn’t reply) made a good first impression. Their estimator spent 90 minutes examining the space, asking questions, verifying where plumbing was (even going up to the attic to check) and explaining the process. The next step was meeting with a designer who would provide a quote based on the materials I chose.

Well.

Keeping in mind that this is the first time I’ve done anything like this (if you discount replacing the floor in the living and dining rooms after a flood), the experience was…underwhelming.

For one thing, the “designer” seemed to be more of an assembler than an actual designer; she just assembled the elements I chose. She asked me no questions about what I wanted to accomplish or why (make the space look bigger and more inviting), what makes me happy, and therefore made no suggestions about how to achieve those desires. Like—how to use color and lines to enlarge the space perception. Also no questions about budget. (And no prices on any of the materials in their showroom; nothing like, “This runs $X per square foot”, or “This light choice is higher priced than that.”) The company has what they call “preferred” materials, which means “our customers choose these frequently; non-preferred things cost more.” But again, no actual prices.

WRT their tile selection (they have “tile” in their company name), there was not a wide range. I dream of pale green shower walls with blue accent tiles; my ideal would have the blue flow down from the hardware and filling the shower floor, like a pool of water. The designer—oh, I’ll call her Maude—kind of blinked. As we flipped through the samples, there was no blue at all, and only very limited green. Non-preferred.

A whole lotta grey, and board after board of cream with speckles and veins; a bunch of tans; some black. There was no suggestion that there might be anything available except what was in the showroom.

I picked out some accent tiles that would liven up the shower walls. They wouldn’t flow into the pan, but they would help. Maude was determinedly neutral on this choice (as she was with everything).

She showed me my “options” for hardware—she said they only use Kohler (although they did have some Delta faucets on display), and the preferred choices were chrome, black or brushed nickel. Then my choices were for the rain head (three) and the handheld on a bar (two, I think).

The one “design” suggestion she made was to assume that I wanted “corner shelves”. I had to ask what they are—little triangles to hold shower products. No—I want a niche, which uses the accent tile.

Not clear whether the sliding glass doors were preferred; if I wanted a pivot door, that would be custom, and they referred me to Dulles Glass. And here was the only price involved in the whole three hours: $1851.53.

We toiled through the vanity, the vanity top, the medicine cabinet (ones with integrated lighting seemed kind of new to her), and then we got to lights. Definitely a light in the shower, but all she’d show me for the rest of the room was vanity lights. On the Kohler website. Which were just outright ugly. I picked the least ugly one just for the sake of argument and we moved on to the flooring, the grout and the baseboards. She was disappointed that I saw no reason to replace the toilet.

We moved on to the powder room that I’d rather like to zhuzh up, which started out with her asking (I guess this was a design question?), “Do you want to use the same vanity and top as your bathroom?”

No. Why would I? Different room, different floor, different users. What’s wrong with you?

The vessel sink absolutely defeated her. She went to the Build.com website and kind of clicked around rather helplessly. I finally said that it would make more sense for me to do some more research and come back for a separate appointment to spec that one out. At that point I’d been there two and a half hours.

She said it would take her 15 minutes to put together a quote. Thirty minutes later, she returned with a single sheet of paper. Before delivering the news, she read from a laminated document that purported to make the case for value versus cost (it didn’t as far as I could tell, but I don’t absorb information well when I’m being read to), stipulated that costs run 75% for labor and 25% for product and used a matrix to ballpark the “average” job of approximately my project size at $27K.

Then she handed me the single sheet of paper, which is a whole lotta text, and one line for the quote (nothing to indicate any specificity WRT customer, date, whatever):

She asked if I was surprised by the cost (what do you think, cupcake—you just read me a thing that said a project like mine should cost $27K, but then hand me a quote for $13K more) and I replied that I thought it was high. When I asked for line item costs, she said they can’t/won’t do that, which basically sealed the deal for me. But she would be happy to work with me to find preferred products instead of the ones I’d chosen…

Well, since I have no idea what those products individually cost, and you don’t seem inclined to tell me the price of anything, the process of going through shower and floor tiles, hardware, vanity tops, medicine cabinets and all the rest of that would be excruciatingly frustrating. One of the things she suggested was going from brushed nickel to chrome—which I didn’t understand, because she’d said that both chrome and BN were “preferred”. Evidently there are differences withing the same category of “preferred”?

Also—if labor is 75% of the total, you could zero out all the product costs and the price would still be $30K, which is $10K over my expectation.

(It occurs to me that this project may be too small for them and that this figure is their way of making me go away. If so, mission accomplished.)

I’m going to try to get at least the scope of work from her—I think she said she could share that with me, but at that point I think my synapses started to misfire. It seems to me that—if you’re going to quote over the odds, you ought to at least back up your big number with a whole lot of smaller ones, but I suppose I could be wrong.

In the meantime, in 24 hours on Reddit I’ve had about 40 recommendations for companies large and small (and a couple of warnings about others), so I start the process over.

This is going to be a long damn haul.

 

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