Your kitchen may be the official heart of the home, the central nerve center where the family meets over meals and performs tasks from paying bills to playing games, but your bathrooms are the rooms where you come again and again. Your bathroom is where you come to take relaxing baths, spend hours when ill and stare at that same ugly tile for half an hour as you get ready in the morning. That’s why bathroom renovations rival kitchen renovations on home makeover lists. Here are four common mistakes people make when renovating their bathroom.
Spending Too Much
How much is too much when you are renovating a bathroom? A good rule of thumb is not to spend more than five to ten percent of the home’s value on renovating a bathroom, since you can’t recoup more than a fraction of the investment when the house is sold later. The only exception is when you are adding a new bathroom to the house to bring it up to the neighborhood average. For example, if you have a three bedroom single bathroom older home and add a second bathroom to make a 3 bedroom 2 bath home that is the norm for your community, then and only then will you recoup a hundred percent or more of the cost of installing a bathroom.
Failing to Waterproof the Renovation
Waterproofing failures are one of the top building defects you’ll find in bathrooms. Walls can decay from mold and water damage because the water seeped in through cracks in the tile because there was no waterproofing layer between the tile and the structural wall. Similar problems arise when toilets and sinks aren’t properly sealed and water starts to leak and damage the new construction almost immediately. Shortcuts that don’t waterproof the new bathroom by amateurs and fly by night operations like not putting a concrete slab under the new shower pan or bathtub can let water leak into the ground beneath the house, attracting insects or damaging the foundation.
Using Cheap Products or the Wrong Products
Faulty products will ruin everything you tried to create with the bathroom renovation. Using cheap toilets you found online can result in both water and sewage leaks. Cheap imported plumbing and fixtures, even if not faulty, may not fit properly and are far more likely to fall apart after only a few months of use. This is why you should buy high quality toilets in Toronto or elsewhere in your area.
Hurting the Resale Value of the Home
Bathroom renovations can hurt the resale value of your home in several ways. Extending a bathroom wall into a master bedroom so you have room for a hot tub or exercise space in the bathroom will decrease the appeal of the house to future buyers. Cutting the size of a master closet in half so that you have an in-bath sitting area likewise hurts the resale value of your home. You never want to decrease the size of bedrooms or storage areas to expand a bathroom, since this hurts the resale value of your home. You can rip out a linen closet in the hallway to get more maneuvering room around the toilet or put in a walk in shower, as long as equivalent storage is put in a logical location somewhere else.
Conclusion
If you’re going to renovate your bathroom, try not to go over budget. And also, don’t go overboard with a bathroom renovation and end up hurting the resale value of your home. Go with a pro instead of trying to do a bathroom renovation yourself, so that they use the right size of quality products for the job. Make minor changes to let light into the bathroom before you start knocking holes in the outside wall. And ensure that the entire project is appropriately waterproof so you don’t end up with costly repairs later.
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