8 bathroom remodeling ideas for Fox Valley homes.

REIJ remodels bathrooms from Montgomery. Vanities, tile, stone, and the moment a plumber has to be named are written up on the bathroom remodeling page. What follows is how we choose among the rooms people actually call about, before anyone falls in love with a slab that will not fit.

1. Close the door before anyone draws

You use the room with the door shut. That is when the door hits the vanity, the towel bar disappears behind the slab, and the shower curb is the thing you think about every morning. We start by standing there. A drawing that only works with the door open is a drawing of a different house.

In older Montgomery houses the hall bath is often the original tub and a vanity that already collides with the door. The work is measured in inches. A primary-suite layout pasted into that room will not survive the first morning.

2. Leave the toilet on its flange

Moving a toilet feels like the bold part of a remodel. Most of the time it is plumbing, and the floor is stronger if the fixture stays where the flange already is. We shift it when the plan is worth that — usually because a walk-in shower will not exist otherwise — and we show that cost before you choose the tile. A toilet move is not a surprise discovered after the deposit.

3. Fit the vanity to the swing, and give it drawers

A vanity that looked right in a showroom will block the shower in a 1950s hall bath. The better piece is usually shorter, built to the alcove rather than shaved down from a stock box. Drawers beat a false panel. Stone or quartz sits on that box, and the backsplash dies into the mirror or the tile instead of stopping in a random line.

An Oswego bungalow upstairs is the same discipline: one tub or shower, a vanity that clears the door, tile that does not pretend the room is large. In the Lemont valley the house is often one full bath and a tight lavatory. The win is a shower you can turn around in and a vanity that does not eliminate the towel hook. Quiet tile belongs there. A large-format slab that needs a perfectly flat wall can be the wrong material for old plaster.

4. Light your face, not the back of your head

One fixture behind you lights the ceiling and leaves the mirror in shadow. A pair of lights at the mirror is the working set, drawn with the vanity. If the fan has to move to reach the outside, that is named before anyone orders a box of tile.

In a Lisle ranch the hall bath is often original to the 1960s: a tub, a small linen niche, one globe light. A new surround or shower, a vanity that fits the studs, and a light at face height is a complete remodel. The primary bath, if the house has one, can be a later phase.

5. Choose tile for the room that is actually wet

Large panels suit a primary shower, where the wall is long and you want it flat. A smaller tile, sometimes a herringbone, suits a room with a tub and one window. The niche goes where your elbow already goes, not where a catalog put a rectangle. In a small older bath, tile that runs cleanly to the ceiling makes the room feel taller than it is.

6. Remodel one bath, then decide about the next

Remodeling every bath at once is rarely wise. The hall bath is often the one that takes the traffic and still has the builder tub and a vanity from the year the house was sold. We remodel that room on its own. The primary suite can wait, or it can be a second project with its own drawing. We will sequence the rooms if you want more than one.

The primary bath in a house from the 1990s or 2000s is a different pattern: a garden tub nobody uses, a shower that is too small, and a long counter with no drawers. On the south side of Naperville that is the usual call. Downtown, it is more often one careful bath. Treat those as two houses, because they are.

7. Name the other trades before the tile is ordered

If the fixtures stay on the same walls, the finish work — vanity, tile, stone, trim, and the lighting layout — is the remodel. A new shower valve, a moved drain, or a fan that has to reach the outside is its own trade, called out before we start, not patched in later. A dripping cartridge is a small repair. We take the room.

8. Add a downstairs bath only when the stack is close

A bath drawn as part of a lower level makes sense when the stack is near enough that we are not inventing a plumbing path across the house. In many Lisle ranches the kitchen or hall bath above puts that stack in a useful place. In a large Naperville plan the stack may be nowhere near the corner you like. We draw the short path, or we tell you the bath is the project.

The bathroom page is where the visit is described: we come to the house, mark what can stay, and draw the vanity, the shower or tub, and the place you stand while drying off. The conversation is free. We have built interior rooms from Montgomery since 2002. If the hall bath is the original tub, that is enough to start.