Complete Guide to Upgrade Your Bathroom on a Budget

This is a collaborative post with tips on remodeling your bathroom on a budget.

There are plenty of reasons you may want to upgrade your bathroom. Maybe it just needs a little push to be the bathroom of your dreams, or maybe you want to maximize ROI and net a tidy profit off a renovation when you eventually sell your home, but either way, you don’t want to spend a fortune doing it.

If you’re looking to remodel or redecorate your bathroom, you’ve come to the right place! Here is the complete, step-by-step process to upgrading your bathroom on a budget.

Budget Bathroom Remodeling

Find the Why

Regardless of the reason why you want to upgrade your bathroom, you don’t want to break the bank doing it. But knowing what exactly your goals are in the renovation will help you set realistic expectations for the project.

If you’re trying to increase your ROI when it comes to selling your home, every purchase made during the course of the renovation ought to fit into a careful, thought out calculation. Your budget will be inflexible.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to remake your dingy old bathroom into the stuff of dreams, you’ll have to take care not to let your head float into the clouds. It will be easier to get carried away and make concessions in your budget for things you would not have considered before.

Make a List

What do you want to change in the bathroom? The length of this list will vary, depending on the size of your bathroom, how outdated it is, and your reason for undertaking a renovation in the first place.

Those bathroom renovators looking to increase the asking price of their home will find that tiny, quality-of-life maintenance repairs will increase the value of a home most notably. Re-caulking tiles and replacing faucets is an easy way to keep a bathroom looking fresh and impressing buyers. They’re also relatively easy repairs that might be DIYed by a skilled homeowner.

Bathroom renovators trying to translate what they see on their vision board into the real world, without concern to profit margins, likely have a very select idea of what they want to mold their bathroom into. For a lot of dreamers in this category, a total bathroom overhaul is the only way to satiate their vision. From floors to mirror to showerhead—it’s all gotta go!

If you’re stuck on what, exactly, you should fixate on upgrading in your bathroom, consult with a professional remodeling service. “Experienced construction companies can give expert advice pulling from decades of experience,” says Everheart Construction, a company which performs bathroom remodeling in Houston.

Contractors have a trained eye for future problems, so they can help identify what will pose a problem when you put your house on the market.

Then Make Two Budgets

The first budget you should be making is one you’ve been dreading this entire article: how much money will this cost? I can’t help you decide what you’re comfortable with spending, but I can tell you that you ought to build in a contingency budget for each section of the bathroom you’re planning on DIYing.

You definitely don’t want to take the plunge into major DIY renovations (like replacing an entire shower or plumbing system) without a fiscal backup plan. If you can’t afford to pay someone to fix whatever you messed up, you can’t afford to mess up! Better skip it, or outsource to a trusted contractor from the start.

The second budget is a budget for your time. Is the bathroom in question the only bathroom available in the home? If you’re completing major renovations, how long can you go without access to a bathroom?

(I don’t need to tell any families with a teenager out there, but the answer is: not long.)

If you are DIYing any aspect of a bathroom renovation or redecoration, how much time can you fit in each week to complete the project? Can you take a chunk of time off to plow through the installation of vinyl flooring or will it take the entirety of the month?

The amount of time you’re willing to budget to your bathroom’s upgrades on a personal level will be colored by your budget and your intentions with the bathroom. But regardless of whether or not you just want to personally enjoy your bathroom, the focus should be on completing the process in a timely manner.

Stretching out a renovation longer than necessary can cause strife within your family. And marriage counseling is too expensive to be added to your bathroom upgrade budget! With this in mind, keep a clear head and realistic expectations for what you can do when you’re home from work. Are you going to spend it re-caulking tile?

With all of this in mind, you should be able to make informed and fiscally responsible decisions in the bathroom renovation process. Good luck upgrading!