Everything about the design side of a single-bathroom remodel is the same as any other bathroom. The tile, the fixtures, the layout, the waterproofing: identical decisions. What is completely different is that the room comes out of service and there is no backup, so every stage of the job lands directly on your daily life rather than on a room you can close the door to and ignore.
That changes what a good contractor does, not just what you do. A crew that knows they are working in the only bathroom in the house sequences differently, orders materials before demo instead of during it, and protects the path from the front door to the bathroom because everyone is walking it constantly. It is worth saying on the very first call, before anyone has quoted anything.
People picture the bathroom being unusable while work is happening and available in between. It does not go that way. From the moment demo starts, the room is out of commission continuously: no toilet on an open drain, no shower on an unfinished pan, no sink once the vanity is out and the supply is capped. It comes back only when the wet area is complete and the fixtures are set and connected.
The parts that hold the schedule are the ones nobody can hurry. Waterproofing has to be intact and, depending on the method, verified before tile. Mortar has to set before grout. Grout and sealants have to cure before water runs on them. None of that responds to pressure, and any crew willing to compress it is taking the risk out of their schedule and putting it into your wall.
The delays that hurt single-bathroom households are almost never the tile work. They are waiting on an inspection that has to happen before the walls close, waiting on a vanity or a countertop that was ordered after demo began, and waiting on a decision that only becomes urgent when the crew is standing there needing an answer. Each of those stops a project cold with the room already torn apart.
The other one is discovery. Wet subfloor around the toilet flange, rot in the framing, or galvanized supply lines that should be replaced while the wall is open all add work that was not in the original plan. That work is worth doing, and doing it now is far better than doing it later. But it adds to a stretch you are already living through, which is a good reason to plan for the possibility rather than hope past it.
Households handle it in a few standard ways. Some stay with family nearby for the stretch when there is no toilet. Some arrange to use a neighbor or relative in the mornings and evenings and simply live around it. Some set up a temporary arrangement in a garage or basement, which works better in warm months than in a Utah January. Some take the trip they had been meaning to take and let the loud part of the project happen without them.
Whichever route you pick, decide it in advance and tell the contractor what it is. A crew that knows you are off-site can work straight through without staging around your morning routine. A crew that knows you are living there will plan differently, often getting the toilet reset and functional at the earliest point the work allows. That is a reasonable thing to ask for directly.
This is the single most useful thing you can control. Vanity, top, sink, faucet, toilet, valve and trim, tile, glass hardware: have every one of them selected, ordered, and physically on hand or confirmed before anyone opens a wall. A backordered item is an inconvenience in a two-bathroom house. In a one-bathroom house it is the reason you are brushing your teeth at the kitchen sink.
Make the same decisions early on the things that are easy to defer: tile layout, niche placement, valve height, where the light and the mirror land, and whether blocking goes in for future grab bars. Every one of those is quick to decide with the walls open and slow to change afterward. Deciding them in advance keeps the crew moving on the days that count most.
Sometimes partially, and it depends on the scope. If the toilet is staying in place and the floor is not being opened at the flange, a crew can often reset it at the end of some days. If the drain is moving, the floor is open, or the flooring is being replaced underneath it, that is not possible. Ask specifically rather than assuming.
It is worth pricing as a separate question with your contractor. Adding a bathroom involves running new supply, drain, and vent, plus framing and finishes, so it is a much larger project than remodeling the one you have. Where it makes sense is when there is an obvious location near existing plumbing, such as a basement below a wet wall.
Generally the work goes better done all at once, and that is the stronger argument. Splitting a single-bathroom remodel into phases means the room goes out of service more than once, and waterproofing and tile cannot be sensibly divided anyway. If the room is coming apart, that is the moment to handle everything you know you want.
Which bathroom it is, and whether anything needs to move. That is enough to begin.
