And nowhere is accurate estimating more important than here, since most homeowners find it essential to have their bathrooms up and running as soon as possible. Unless you’re lucky enough to have several bathrooms, leaving the only bathroom incapacitated during remodeling is a major inconvenience.
How Long a Bathroom Remodel Takes
On average, a small complete bathroom remodel can be done in about 23 days under ideal circumstances. Assuming that no work is done on weekends, this translates to about 4 1/2 weeks—slightly more than one month—if the work proceeds uniformly with no breaks. In the real world, where downtime or unexpected circumstances invariably arise, it could be about double that—46 days, or about 9 weeks.
Factors Affecting Bathroom Remodel Time
The reality is that it is very rare a bathroom remodeling project goes exactly as planned, and a variety of factors can change your best efforts at scheduling:
Is the project a cosmetic remodel or a strip-to-the-studs rebuild? Depending on the nature of the remodel, the work can take as little as a few days or as much as many months.Are you doing the work yourself or are you hiring a contractor? More than one good-intentioned homeowner has found that doing all the work yourself, squeezing in work time when you can, leads to a project that can take as much as a year or more to complete.If you’re hiring out the work, is the contractor an owner-operator, or is that contractor subcontracting electricians, plumbers, and carpenters? Working with a single owner-operator remodeler can be the cheapest way to go. But that person will likely be juggling your job with several other jobs as they try to do all the work by themselves. This means that a job that requires 10 or 15 actual workdays can take two or three months to see completion.Are all materials readily available or are they special-order goods that may cause you to wait for delivery? Waiting on imported ceramic tile to arrive, for example, can delay a project by several weeks.
That said, it’s usually easy enough to come up with a ballpark estimate of how long a complete remodel of a small bathroom will take if you are working with a competent general contractor who is working with equally competent subcontractors.
Prepare for the Unexpected
The timetable below assumes the work is being done by a good general contractor working with competent subcontractors, that all tradespeople show up on time, that no one gets sick, materials are readily available. Slowdowns can also happen on the client side. You, the homeowner, must issue payments on time and not issue any unnecessary change orders that slow down the progress. More importantly, this is an idealized timetable. Dead days have been removed and all workdays have been pushed together so that no gaps remain. It assumes that the minute one worker is finished, the next person steps in immediately. Again, don’t be surprised if the reality is about double this idealized schedule.
