Bathrooms.
We redo everything. We don't refresh.
Our approach
We demolish down to the structure. Walls bare, floor bare, plumbing and electricity renewed, waterproofing and ventilation redone before a single visible element is installed.
It may seem excessive for a fifty-square-foot room. Yet it's the only way to get a bathroom that lasts twenty years. A bathroom is the most heavily used room in the house relative to its size, and the only one where an invisible mistake eventually shows up in the ceiling of the floor below.
What costs money and never shows
The waterproofing membrane
Under the shower tile and on the floor. It's the only thing keeping water from reaching the structure. A low quote almost always starts there.
The slope of the shower floor
It's shaped in the mortar bed, not in the tile. An approximate slope shows in water pooling in a corner, and gets fixed by redoing the whole shower.
Ventilation
Sized for the real volume of the room and vented outside, never into the attic. It's the most frequent cause of mould in the ceiling of a recent bathroom.
These three items are a large share of the cost and zero percent of the visible result. They're also the three that cause nearly all the do-overs.
What else we know how to do
The linear drain
It requires a slope on a single axis and a complete rebuild of the shower floor structure. In a building where the drain can't go down, another connection path has to be found.
The wall-hung toilet
The tank is built into the wall and the outlet is horizontal. It needs a reinforced frame and a connection at a different height from the one originally planned.
The curbless shower
The shower floor is level with the floor of the room. All the mechanics play out within the thickness of the structure available under the finished floor.
These three installations mean moving or reconnecting pipes. In a condo, a plex or a tower, that's exactly the point where most contractors say no. It's the context of our Nuns' Island case, where the concrete floor couldn't be drilled and access from below was never granted.
What isn't a job for us
Swapping a vanity and a faucet. Laying tile over the old one. Freshening up before a sale. These are legitimate jobs, but they're not ours, and another contractor will serve you better and cheaper.
Nuns' Island condo
Wall-hung toilet and linear drain delivered without drilling the concrete.
The plan called for precisely the two installations that normally require moving pipes under the slab. The building's rules forbade drilling the concrete floor, and access through the downstairs neighbour's ceiling was never granted.
We traced the real path of the building's drainage lines to find connection points usable from our side of the slab, with an access hatch kept open until a precise stage of the work. The toilet is wall-hung, the shower has its linear drain, nothing was drilled.
Read the case
So, what are we working on?
Eight questions, two minutes. We call you back to talk it through, and we tell you frankly whether it's a project for us or whether you'd be better served elsewhere.