So, what’s a master bathroom remodeling project supposed to cost, anyway?

Like any construction project, the answer is, “How high is up?” You can spend an almost unlimited amount of money while tinkering around with any part of your house. Bathrooms are famous for costing big. If you want a bathroom that looks like one of Saddam Hussein’s old palaces, no one is going to stop you, and many TV hosts will egg you on. They might not stop you, but they are going to bill you. The potential cost of a bathroom remodeling project is exceeded only by a kitchen re-do or a divorce on the scale of what things cost. Many kitchen and bath remodeling projects end in divorce, so I lumped them all together.

But I’m slipping out of touch with such matters. When you don’t have any money, it’s pointless to wonder how much things cost. To us, the Hometown cable show is Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. You have a budget for throw pillows? OK, Rockefeller. I used to rely on Means Residential Square Foot cost books (Contractor Pricing Guide) to ballpark construction projects. They came out every year, and were pretty accurate. They were swallowed up by some other business, but they still publish them, I guess. You can buy one here. Make sure you bring money. Most of their books cost about what I’d budget for completing the whole project, so I haven’t bought one for a very long time.

Hey, let’s ask the internet. The internet is free, and worth it, as I often remark. Let’s ask it what a master bathroom remodeling job might cost. Hey look, the Orange Place pops right up, and comes across with an answer right off:

I don’t know why I bother to write jokes when they’re just lying around on the internet like that. And I don’t know about you, but I have a strict policy on these matters. I don’t care if it’s a BMW or a bathroom, I don’t poop in anything that costs $30,000 and up. And just between you, me, and the wall, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be installing a $30,000 bathroom in my $24,000 house, even though that bulleted list is pretty much exactly what we’re aiming to accomplish, just not in the dreary style they’ve achieved in the picture. Thirty grand for a Home Depot-grade bathroom is like ordering champagne with your Big Mac, or putting premium gas in a rental car. We can do better, with a lot less.

So I did a little pricing of my own, back when we were planning this foofarah. What’s a plastic shower base cost?

How about a plastic enclosure to go with it?

I wasn’t allura-ed by the designs or the finishes, and my bathroom already has a mustee smell, thank you very much. Even for this crapola, if you add the cheapest versions together, the shower stall is around $550. It ain’t worth it. I just got rid of the Reagan’s-first-term version of this shower enclosure, remember? I hated it. I would hate these, even if they were new. I figured we could do better. I got to poking around, and discovered things have gotten way, way better in the shower world in the last five years or so. We got one of these, instead, for about the same money:

It might be one of their best sellers, but the Orange Place didn’t sell one to us. We didn’t pay over $500 for it either. We don’t shop like regular humans anymore.

First, I went to Amazon. I treat Amazon the way other people used to treat Best Buy. Everyone looked at stuff on the shelves in Best Buy, and then went home and bought it off Amazon. Well, since Amazon has become some kind of weird bazaar of drop-ship villainy and warehouses heaving with counterfeit goods and pop bottles filled with warm yellow liquids, I treat them like they treated Best Buy. I find what I want, look in the right hand column to see who’s actually selling it at rock bottom prices, and see if they have their own store outside of Amazon. Many, if not most, do now. I found Contractors Direct, verified they were real people in a real building that I could find if they cheated me, and bought it directly from them. They seem to find a way to give Amazon’s vigorish back to their customers if Amazon’s not involved. Same, stuff, rock bottom price, delivered in a couple of days, in perfect shape. I’d rather give my money to regular humans in Connecticut than pay Jeff Bezos’ alimony.

So you might look at that weird collection of orange stuff and wonder how you’re supposed to make a shower out of it. The minute I saw it, I knew exactly how to use it, because I knew the old-fashioned shower construction arrangement it superseded. I used to perform construction work in mansions, and sometimes they wanted an old-school walk-in shower enclosure. Thirty years ago, only the very wealthy could afford a walk-in shower. They were labor and material intensive.

You’d begin by framing out a stall. Then a copper liner was fabricated to act as the base. It went up the walls about six inches. The seams were all soldered. That sounds inexpensive, doesn’t it? Once it was in place, expanded metal lath was stapled on the studs, usually over a sheet of heavy plastic or sometimes tar paper, to keep the moisture in the shower. Then two or three coats of mortar were smooshed on the lath, usually by a very skilled mason, sometimes by a plasterer. A tilesetter would usually install the mortar bed that went inside the copper tray. It was a tricky installation; it had to slope enough in four directions to get water to run into the drain, but not be so steep it was uncomfortable to stand on. Then the whole thing was tiled to a fare-thee-well.

So I saw the Schluter apparatus and had a kitten over it. The orange membrane is waterproof. You apply it to regular drywall like wallpaper, except you use thinset mortar instead of wallpaper paste. The floor is a plastic sheet with a hole for the drain, already sloped properly and covered with the same membrane. There’s gaskets for the holes for the plumbing fixtures, and a pre-made, waterproof curb. There’s rolls of membrane for any seams. You can trim all the plastic stuff to size with a utility knife. It’s rich folks stuff for less than poor folks stuff costs. And the price was low enough that we could afford to buy two pre-made niches for soap and shampoo, too, and still get out of the deal for less than a shabby plastic shower tray and surround.

All I have are fuzzy pictures and dad jokes, but you can watch the Schluterman put one in, if you’re interested or bored or Jeff Bezo’s ex-wife, waiting around for your alimony check:

So, we became instant Schluter devotees here at the cottage. It’s entered the lexicon. We no longer take showers. We schluter. “Have you schlutered yet, dear?”

[To be continued]