Full Bathroom Renovation in Minneapolis

A full bathroom renovation is a gut of the room down to the studs and subfloor, then a rebuild of the plumbing, electrical, waterproofing, tile, vanity, fixtures and finish work, and Top Notch Floors does all of it with one crew instead of five subcontractors you have to chase.

One crew matters more in a bathroom than anywhere else in the house. The room is small, the trades stack on top of each other, and a two-day gap waiting on a tile setter turns into a two-week gap. Our guys demo it, rough it in, waterproof it, tile it and hang the trim. You call one number.

Plan on three to four weeks for a standard hall bath, longer if we are moving fixtures or the tile is complicated. That is not a crew working slowly. Mortar cures, waterproofing cures, grout cures, and paint needs a day. We build the schedule around those waits and tell you up front which days nobody will be in the house.

Demo is where an older Minneapolis bathroom shows what it has been hiding. We open walls in 1920s and 1950s houses every week and find rot in the subfloor around the toilet flange, galvanized supply pipe choked down to a pencil hole, a shower that was tiled straight onto drywall with no membrane at all, and a fan that vents into the attic instead of outside. None of that is a surprise to us. We photograph what we find, price the fix before we touch it, and you approve it.

Licensed plumbing and electrical come in when we move a drain, replace supply lines, add a circuit, or relocate a fan. Minneapolis and the suburbs require permits for that work, and we pull them. Permits mean an inspector looks at the rough-in before it gets covered, which is exactly what you want on a room full of water.

Electrical gets brought current while the walls are open: GFCI protection on every bathroom receptacle, and an exhaust fan ducted to the outside through the roof or a sidewall with an insulated line and a real damper. In our climate, a fan dumping warm wet air into a cold attic grows mold and frost. That gets fixed on every job whether it was in the original scope or not.

Keeping the existing layout is the single biggest lever on your budget. Fixtures stay where the drains already are, and the money goes into tile, a better vanity and good fixtures. Moving the toilet or relocating the shower means opening the floor, rerouting drain lines and re-venting, and on a slab or a finished ceiling below, that adds real cost. We will tell you honestly when the new layout is worth it and when it is not.

Tub-to-shower conversions are the most requested change we make in a full renovation, especially in primary baths where nobody has taken a bath in a decade. If it is the only tub in the house, think about resale before pulling it.

Waterproofing goes in before a single tile does. Membrane on the walls, a proper pan with slope to the drain, sealed corners and seams, and a flood test where it matters. Tile is the finish. The waterproofing behind it is the part that decides whether this bathroom is fine in twenty years.

If it is the only bathroom in the house, say so at the estimate. We sequence the work so the toilet goes back in the fastest possible order, and we talk through the gap days before we start rather than after.