If you purchase a home that needs updating, “How Much” will become your new personal slogan. The bathrooms need updating. How much? The floors need to be replaced. How much? The windows need to be replaced. How much? It can go on and on until you get to the point where you might as well have knocked the house down! Let’s talk real numbers from a recent example.
We recently updated a bathroom in a condo we own in Athens, GA. It wasn’t huge but it was a full bathroom with a tub/shower, toilet and sink. It had tile floors, the original one piece tub/shower and a pedestal sink from the original build. We wanted to keep exactly none of it. Everything had to go. This is not our primary residence so we were not looking for top of the line anything but I still wanted it to be something I would like to have and you do not have to spend a crazy amount of money with all of the available in stock options that the big box stores carry these days. There are tons of options. Some more affordable than others but it all adds up. Just ask my husband.
This was the before.
Everything came from Lowes, Home Depot and Floor and Decor. The splurge item was the shower wall tile because it is a marble tile. It is the main thing you see because you are staring at it from the bedroom so we wanted it to be a little more than basic, visually. So, with the odds and ends, major visible materials were around $5000. There are other materials though. You need grout, caulk, screws, prep stuff everywhere, trim for the shower, etc, etc. That’s around another $1500 for the essentials needed for the tile, shower and walls. Then you have your labor costs. You have to pay the cost to demo the space, the shower tile is your most expensive labor item, the tile floor, installing a new shower base because you took out a tub and now it is just a shower, the extra labor because you want a shower niche, repairing the walls and painting the walls. Then, you pay the plumber to come twice because they come once before tile and once after to install your toilet, faucet and new shower head.
The entire bathroom was around $11,000 using off the rack materials. It was a little more than 5′ wide and 12′ long. 60 square feet of space. So, if you are looking through some of the older homes in the area, if you are still watching HGTV and think you can update an entire home for $50K, that’s just not realistic but unless you have recently completed a project, it’s impossible to know what things cost other than the items you can price out but there is just a lot more that goes into a renovation than the finished materials you can actually see at the end so I hope you find this helpful.
Riverview Redo 