Our “little” bathroom renovation part 2.

Recap: My wife and I decided that this is the year we remodel our bath, and since we are sick of working on the house for the last two years we decided that we want to hire out this project rather than take it on ourselves.  We met with a bath designer and told him what we wanted out of the bathroom project, and that our budget would be $15k.  He told us that it was very doable, and that he would contact us in a week with a design…..

So our designer called and we met him up to go over his plan, and the one question on our minds was how much will this renovation cost?  I probably should have mentioned that this design store is located in downtown Plymouth in Michigan.  We love downtown Plymouth, it is full of shops that my wife loves to go into as well as bars and restaurants.  It is very trendy, and rent is probably not very cheap for a design store so we should have probably guessed what was coming next.

The design that he presented was very nice no doubt.  Our double sink vanity would have a granite countertop and two tall cabinets on each end for storage.  They would make a wood frame to insert the soaking bathtub into and tile all around it.  The shower was very large and had a nice glass door and all the faucets and accessories were very modern and we loved the design.  Overall the design wasn’t anything crazy or something that we couldn’t have come up with on our own.  The bathtub was a soaking tub only and we had even thought of maybe adding a jetted tub.  The shower is a higher end shower with body jets, and it is a much bigger shower.  The tile we had picked ourselves was not very expensive at all.

So when he looked at us at the end after we had asked all the questions we wanted to ask and said that the overall design based on the quotes he had received from his electrician, plumber and tile guy was going to be about 25k, my heart nearly stopped.  This guy was very nice and my wife and I were set on going with him without getting any other quotes before we heard him give us that number.  We wanted a nice bath and we plan on staying in this house for the rest of our lives hopefully but 25k is much more than we are willing to spend on this project.

We talked to him some more and explained that we wanted to make a couple of changes to bring the cost down.  He is planning on meeting up with us sometime this week to go over final price.  We plan on negotiating with him, but overall I am very turned off.  He knew our budget when we walked into the door and he never made it seem like it would be something outrageous like this.  Finally something that bugged me was the fact that he never actually gave us a breakdown of the cost of the project and only gave us one number.  I asked him for a breakdown this time so I can see where this money is going.  I am not asking the guy to work for free, but at the end of the day he is just “managing” the project and hiring the guys to do the work.

We have decided to get a couple of other quotes and do some comparison.  Probably a naïve statement for me to make but I recommend not going to a design store in an expensive location.

To be continued….