Subdivision homes built from the 1970s through the 1990s make up a large share of Sandy, and their bathrooms are reaching the end at the same time. The tub surround, the vanity top, the fan that never moved much air, the flooring: all of it went in during the same week decades ago and all of it is worn out together. Homeowners here rarely call about one broken thing. They call because everything in the room is original. We connect you with bathroom remodeling contractors working across Salt Lake County. Call 801-644-9000.
There is a particular version of this project that shows up constantly in Salt Lake County subdivisions of that era. The hall bath and the primary bath are both original, both tired, and neither one is failing badly enough to force a decision. Nothing is leaking. The finishes are simply done. That makes the project a matter of planning rather than emergency, which is an advantage: you get to decide the order, the timing, and how much of the house is under construction at any one time instead of reacting to water on the floor at an inconvenient moment.
It also means a contractor should look at both rooms during the estimate even if you only intend to do one. Bathrooms stacked above each other or backed onto the same wall often share plumbing, and work in one can make later work in the other simpler. Knowing that in advance may change which room you start with, or whether a section of pipe gets replaced now while it is accessible. Ask the contractor to walk both rooms and tell you plainly what the first project does and does not do for the second one.
Bathrooms from this period were laid out for speed and repetition, and you see the same arrangements over and over: a narrow hall bath with the tub at the far end, a primary bath with a compartmented toilet, a mirror glued edge to edge above a long vanity, a soaking tub taking up floor space nobody has used in years. Some of that is worth keeping, because the plumbing supports it and moving it buys you little. Some of it is worth changing, because the room is being emptied anyway and the walls are already open.
The tub is usually the decision that drives everything else. Converting a rarely used garden tub into a larger shower changes the drain, the waterproofing detail, the door swing, and often the vanity run beside it. Keeping the tub keeps the project contained. Neither answer is right in the abstract. What helps is asking each contractor to walk you through what changes downstream from that one choice, so you are comparing whole consequences instead of a single line on a page that happens to describe the same fixture.
Phasing is normal and reasonable when several bathrooms are original at the same time. The usual pattern is to start with the room that gets the hardest use, or the one whose failure would be most disruptive, and come back to the others afterward. The risk is that a phased plan quietly becomes a series of unrelated projects with different materials, different crews, and a house that never quite matches itself. That outcome is avoidable, but only if the phases are planned together even when they are carried out years apart.
A practical way to handle it: settle on tile, fixture finishes, and door hardware for the whole house before the first room starts, and write those selections down somewhere you will find them later. Ask whether the contractor keeps a record of what went into each project. Ask which parts of the second room could be roughed in during the first, if any, while access is already open. Even if you act on none of those answers now, they cost you nothing to have and they make the next project much easier to start.
It depends on whether the household can spare both rooms at once. Doing them together means one mobilization, one dust event, and consistent materials throughout. Doing them in sequence keeps a working bathroom available the entire time. If the two rooms share a wall with plumbing in it, ask whether that shared work can be done once during the first project regardless of which approach you choose, since that often settles the question.
Grout and caulk go first, since they are maintenance items, then the fan and the finish on the vanity top. The one that matters most is the seal where the tub or shower base meets the wall, because a slow failure there moves water into the subfloor without showing much on the surface. Soft flooring near the tub edge, or a stain on a ceiling below, is the signal to open it up rather than recaulk again.
Often, but not always cleanly. Those units were frequently set before the walls were finished, so getting one out can mean cutting it apart and disturbing surrounding drywall and trim. The replacement also has to fit the existing opening or the framing gets modified. It stays a contained project when the framing and subfloor underneath are sound, and becomes a larger one when they are not, which is known only after the unit is out.
Which bathroom it is, and whether anything needs to move. That is enough to begin.
