It’s a question Paula and the rest of Team CRATE get often: why do bathroom remodels cost so much? In this video, CRATE founder and CEO Scott Monday explains why bathroom renovations often cost more than people are expecting.
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Hey everybody, Scott Monday with Kitchen and Bath Crate. I have some really exciting news for you. Just a couple of weeks ago, I published my first book, “The Crate Way.” This is a homeowner’s guide, a step-by-step guide to a painless remodel. And really, this has been a passion project of mine for actually about a year and a half or so, and it finally came together. I’m super excited about it. Really, what it does, it takes my 20 years in the construction industry and specifically in the home improvement sector and really kind of takes it into a single 100-page book that walks a customer through the entire remodel process. So it covers things like how to take your idea to action, how to take your scope of work and use it to select a contractor, navigating the permitting and inspection process of a job, timing your job, and actually getting through a construction project in a way that’s actually very pleasant even in the midst of construction. The book covers all of those things. It’s actually for sale right now on Amazon.com, so go to kbcrate.com, scroll down just a little bit, you’ll see a link there to Amazon, and I can’t wait to share this information with you and anybody else that might benefit from it. Thanks so much for watching. [Music] [Music] you Hey everybody, Scott with Kitchen and Bath Crate. Today, I’m going to be answering a question for you that we get all the time from potential customers. Why do bathrooms cost so much, right? They’re so expensive, you guys. How could it possibly be that they’re more than a kitchen? I can’t believe it. There’s no way that what you’re telling me is true. But friends, it’s true, and Cheeto, our company mascot, and I are here to tell you a couple of reasons why. And those reasons fall into two categories: the first category, actual, factual, mathematical reasons why bathrooms cost so much. And the second one, what we call perception-related reasons, kind of cultural-related reasons why it seems like bathrooms cost so much. We’re gonna dive deeply into those items, so I hope you enjoy. And, you know, grab your own bag of peanut M&Ms, pull up a chair, and here we go with why bathrooms cost so much.
All right, so the first reasons that bathrooms tend to cost so much is a simple quantity of plumbing fixtures. Now, plumbing fixtures are expensive, right? I mean, if you look online right now, especially with all the cost increases we see for different products and the scarcity of materials, faucets are going through the roof, and other things are just going through the roof. And so plumbing fixtures are a really critical cost element of a remodel project. So let’s think about this. Let’s think about your kitchen. So close your eyes and imagine you’re in there, and Grandma’s bolognese sauce boiling up there with the stovetop, and that’s just, you got that warm fuzzy feeling from being in her kitchen back when you were young. But think about it, how many sinks did Grammy have? She had one, right? Maybe a faucet, perhaps a soap dispenser, garbage disposal, and a pot fill if Grammy was a big-time baller. A pot fill, that’s amazing technology right there. Now think about your bathroom. You have at least one sink, if not two. And then, of course, each one of those sinks has a faucet, or else it’s not gonna be very useful. You have a toilet, or else it’s not a very good bathroom, right? And then also, you have a tub or a shower, or a tub and a shower, right? So if you add up the number of plumbing fixtures, bathrooms simply have way more plumbing fixtures than kitchens do, and that really drives the cost of bathrooms up. Are we doing, Cheeto? We’re doing well. All right, good. Stay there, buddy. Keep looking good.
All right, so the second reason that bathrooms cost so much is the square footage of hard surfaces. Now, let’s, uh, let’s once again think through this. Kitchens, hard surfaces. What do you have? You have countertops, you have backsplash, and then possibly flooring. You know, if you’re doing a tile or something like that, but most of the time, it’s an LVP or something these days. But really, you’re at countertops and backsplash. That’s your square footage of hard surfaces. Now, hard surfaces are inherently costly, cost a lot of money to buy the material, cost a lot of money to fabricate the material, and cost a lot of money to set the material. Now, let’s think about your bathroom hard surfaces. Let’s start from the ground up. Your floor in a bathroom is almost always going to be a hard surface, usually a tile product, right? For waterproofing. Then you have your vanity tops, you have your vanity splash, and then you have your shower floor, if it’s a shower, your shower walls, or if it’s a tub, you have your shower enclosure around the top of your tub. So if you were to add up your square footage of hard surfaces in the bathroom, it’s going to sometimes exceed a medium to a large-size kitchen, and that square footage alone drives the cost up.
And the final logical, mathematical, factual reasons why bathrooms tend to cost so much has to do with layout. Typically, kitchens, we encounter the layout that they have is really the best layout. The sink location is where it should be. The appliances, for the most part, are located where they should be, and there’s really not a lot of room to actually do fundamental movement of the layout. But that is just not the case in the bathrooms. Tell you what, in bathrooms, we’re moving the tub here, and the vanity here, and the toilet here, and then we’re taking this out, we’re putting this in, we’re going from tub-shower combinations to showers, and we’re doing these big shower doors, we’re doing all this configuration. The small square footage, and it just drives the cost up. You know why? Because every time you move something, there’s something connected to it in the walls or in the ground, right? You can’t just move your toilet by itself. It doesn’t float. There’s not some magical little compartment in your toilet that just causes it to compost in and of itself. It’s connected to your drain line. It has a plumbing supply line. So every time you move those things, what does it do to your price? Up, up, up, right? And so the last reason that bathrooms tend to cost a lot more than kitchens is there tends to be, in today’s design criteria, in today’s modern-day layouts, there tends to be a lot more reconfiguration of bathroom spaces when compared with kitchens.
So the next category of reasons why bathrooms cost so much is what I’ll call an issue of perception, right? This is something that just seems that way. It’s not really based upon mathematics. It’s just a perception issue. So the first perception is, how could a space, a bathroom, where I don’t do any entertaining – well, I guess you could, where most people don’t do any entertaining – how can a bathroom, where you don’t do any entertaining, cost so much more than a kitchen, where you host your entire family of 23 every holiday, whether or not you want to, right? How could it possibly be that this small space, the space that no one ever sees except when they’re going to actually use the facility or if it’s a master, maybe a certain member of the family are using it, how could it possibly be that those private spaces, those spaces where you want to go at the end of the day into your beautiful master bathroom, you want to feel like a spa, you want to be able to walk in, relax, enjoy it, have a nice freestanding soaking tub sitting there, or maybe a beautiful shower that’s clean and pristine grout, and in a beautiful glass enclosure. You know, this cool furniture-style vanity or a floating vanity, maybe with some under-lighting to it. You just want an oasis you can go into, right? Or maybe if it’s your hall bathroom, you’re sick and tired – you’re sick and tired – of entertaining, having people walk into that bathroom that the kids use, right? Screw it all up. It’s just an embarrassment, and you want something new. And those are the reasons, folks, why, after this many Bath Crate projects, we’ve never had a customer tell us they wish they didn’t do the project. Thanks so much for your time. I hope this shed some light onto why bathrooms tend to cost more than people think. Hope there’s some good information for you. kbcrate.com or give us a call 888-995-7996. We’d love to help you with your project or even riff with you about why a bathroom might cost a little bit more than you think. Thanks so much.
