Faucets for your Kitchen and Bath

Planning An Affordable Bathroom Remodel

Is your bathroom a contemporary spa-like sanctuary where you can sooth away the stress of the day? Or is it glaringly clear that your bathroom has not seen an update since the Jimmy Carter administration? Some older bathrooms can be called “traditional” or even “retro, but most are just considered old. If it is time to give your pink and green bathroom a facelift, here are a few tips to incorporate all of today’s popular decorating finishes without breaking your budget in the process.

1. The Whirlpool Bathtub. Even though you may have your heart set on a traditional 2-person whirlpool tub, you might be surprised to learn how much these cost. A Jacuzzi Bellavista whirlpool tub is a definite study in elegance, and expense. This particular model costs in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. Ouch! That can blow your remodeling budget in a hurry and leave you cutting corners at the end of the project when the money runs out. As an alternative, you can install a one-person jetted tub such as the Kohler Bancroft model, which fits into a standard bathtub footprint and is a less than a third the cost of the Jacuzzi Bellavista.

2. The Heated Floor. Sure, radiant bathroom flooring is all the rage these days. After all, who wouldn’t want to step out of the tub and onto a toasty warm tile floor, warmed from beneath by electricity or hot water running through tubes. Because a bathroom remodel does not usually involve pouring a cement floor as you might to in new construction, radiant flooring for a bathroom remodel usually consists of a dry installation technique.

This technique involves running cables or tubes in an air space below the subfloor. As you can imagine, this process can be a bit pricey for bathroom remodel and often requires that the bathroom floor be built up to allow space to run the radiant tubing beneath it. When you change your floor height, you change the way everything else fits into your bathroom, including the height of your plumbing runs. So, between the cost of the radiant flooring itself, and the cost of altering your plumbing scheme, radiant flooring can become an expensive luxury in a remodeling situation.

The cheaper alternative is to install an infrared heat lamp in your bathroom. You can still enjoy the decadence of a toasty warm bathroom, but with much less fuss and bother. And remember, in remodeling terms, fuss and bother add up to cash out of your pocket.

3. The Cabinets. While custom-made cabinets may sound super luxurious, they can also be super expensive. When at all possible, purchase factory made cabinets for your bathroom and use the savings to buy a special bathroom Faucet, which usually makes more of a design statement than your cabinets.

4. The Metals. Bite the bullet and skip the brushed nickel fixtures. Chrome can give the same modern appearance at a fraction of the cost. If you must have brushed nickel, check out some of the two-tone bathroom accessories that combine chrome with one of the more expensive metals. This is a little trick used by designers to incorporate a touch of high-end metals, while tying in with some of the original chrome accessories such as doorknobs and cabinet hinges.

So remember, if your bathroom is still sporting Hollywood light bars and chipped linoleum flooring, you have two choices: either wait for avocado green to come back into style, or get started on that bathroom remodel. If you use a few of the above tips, you can update your bathroom without draining your bank account in the process.

About the Author

The author writes frequently on home decorating and interior design. She likes to choose decorative bathroom accessories to give a bathroom a  distinctive appearance. ceramic bathroom accessories come in many colors and styles and are quite affordable.

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