A Contemporary Bathroom Remodel, Week By Week
Six to eight weeks. Not because the labor takes that long — because concrete cures, inspectors show up on their own schedule, and one out-of-order step (looking at you, shower door) can cost a week and a reorder. Here is the honest build log: what happens each week, when to call a pro, and the VIGO fixtures that land at the loading dock right before you need them.
A contemporary bathroom remodel is a 6–8 week sequence: scope & budget, demo, plumbing/electrical rough-in (including your linear-vs-point drain decision), waterproofing + inspection, tile, then fixtures — finishing with the shower door, which is always installed last because it must be measured to finished tile. Order long-lead items (door, shower panel) in Week 1; hire a GC for anything that moves plumbing or trips an inspection.
The 7-Week Build At A Glance
This is a typical single-bathroom schedule. Yours may compress to 6 weeks or stretch to 8 — inspections and cure times, not hours of labor, decide which. Read it top to bottom before you swing a single hammer.
Lock the layout, set a real budget, pull permits, and order long-lead items now (shower door + shower panel).
Strip to studs and subfloor. Discover what is actually behind the wall before you commit finishes.
Plumbing + electrical. The big call: linear vs point drain, and exactly where it sits. Rough-in inspection.
Backer board, pan slope, membrane, flood test. The invisible week that decides whether the room lasts 20 years.
Set, then grout after cure. Large-format tile is where your Week 3 drain choice pays off — or punishes you.
Vanity, sink, faucet, shower panel, drains, hardware — installed in order. Everything but the door.
Measure to finished tile, install the shower door last, walk the punch list, seal, and hand over.
How Long Does A Contemporary Bathroom Remodel Take?
A full contemporary bathroom remodel realistically runs 6 to 8 weeks from demo to punch list — about one week each for scope, demo, and tile, one to two for rough-in, one for waterproofing plus inspection, and one for fixtures and the door. Cure times and inspector availability, not labor hours, set the pace.
The single biggest schedule-killer is treating it like a weekend project that happens to have gaps. It is the opposite: a chain of wait-states — thinset cures, membrane cures, grout cures, the inspector comes Tuesday — strung between short bursts of work. Plan around the waits and 7 weeks feels calm. Ignore them and every step slides.
Scope, Budget & The Orders You Place Today
Week 1 has no dust. It is measuring, deciding, and buying the two things with the longest lead times so they arrive when you need them. Contemporary here means clean lines, large-format tile, a frameless glass door, and a wall-mounted or vessel sink — a look that lives or dies on rough-in precision, which is why planning matters more than in a like-for-like swap.
Get help with
- Any layout that moves the toilet flange, tub, or drain line
- Load-bearing wall changes or window relocation
- Permit drawings if your city requires stamped plans
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- Measuring the room and building a to-scale layout
- Choosing finishes, fixtures, and tile
- Placing fixture orders and tracking ship dates
Permits and budget, honestly: if you are moving plumbing, adding a circuit for a shower panel, or altering framing, you almost certainly need a permit — and the rough-in inspection in Week 3 depends on it. Rules are set locally, so call your building department before demo. On cost, we will not invent an average: labor, tile, and fixture totals swing wildly by region and scope. Get three itemized bids, then add a 15–20% contingency for what demo reveals.
Order the door + shower panel in Week 1 — they install last but ship slowest.
Buying finishes before you know your rough-in. A shower panel dictates valve height and supply spacing; a vessel sink dictates faucet reach and drain depth. Choose these in Week 1 so the plumber roughs to your fixtures — not to generic stub-outs you fight later.
Demo: Strip It To The Studs
Demo is loud, fast, and the cheapest week to change your mind. Take the room down to studs and subfloor so you can see what is actually there — rot, old galvanized supply lines, a drain that is not where the plans said. Contemporary layouts often relocate the sink or drain, and this is the week that tells you what that will really cost.
Get help with
- Cast-iron tub removal (often 300+ lb — two people minimum)
- Any wall you are not 100% sure is non-load-bearing
- Suspected asbestos in pre-1990 flooring or mastic
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- Removing tile, vanity, toilet, and drywall
- Bagging and hauling debris (rent a dumpster)
- Documenting existing plumbing with photos before it is gone
Cap and protect. Once fixtures are out, cap open supply and drain lines, kill the circuits at the panel, and seal the doorway with plastic — bathroom dust travels through a whole house. No VIGO product lands in Week 2; this is pure subtraction. But photograph every open wall: those pictures decide your Week 3 drain and valve placement.
Demoing before the new fixtures are on hand or confirmed. If your relocated drain needs to hit a specific joist bay, you want the drain body and door specs in the room before the plumber roughs in. Tearing out first and measuring later is how a drain ends up 3 inches from where the tile layout wanted it.
Rough-In: Where The Drain Goes Decides Everything
This is the highest-stakes week. Plumbing and electrical get set inside the walls and floor, then an inspector signs off before anything gets covered. The headline decision: linear drain or point drain, and precisely where it lands. Get it wrong and you find out in Week 5 when the tile will not lay flat.
Should You Use A Linear Or Point Drain?
Use a linear drain for large-format tile and a curbless, single-slope floor — VIGO's Elan 24 in. linear drain needs just one pitch toward a wall. Choose a point (center) drain for tighter budgets and standard curbed showers, where the floor pitches four ways to a square grate. Both are correct; they demand different tile and slope work.
| Factor | Linear drain (Elan 24"/36") | Point / square drain (Elan) |
|---|---|---|
| VIGO price (from) | $84.90 (24 in.) · $104.90 (36 in.) | $44.90 (square grate) |
| Floor slopes needed | 1 — single plane toward one wall | 4 — four-way pitch to the center |
| Largest tile that lays flat | 12 x 24 in. and up (flat plane) | ~4 x 4 in. mosaic near the drain |
| Curbless / zero-threshold | Yes — ideal for it | Harder — usually needs a curb |
| Grate footprint | 24 or 36 in. slot along a wall | ~4–5 in. square in the field |
| Best placement | Against a wall or at the entry | Center of the shower floor |
| DIY waterproofing difficulty | Higher — one clean flush plane, less forgiving | Moderate — four small slopes, more forgiving |
“From” prices are each drain's lowest-priced finish, pulled live from vigoindustries.com on July 9, 2026. Both drains ship in 4 finishes.
Get help with
- Relocating the drain line or tying into the stack
- The shower valve and any new electrical circuit
- Anything that goes to a permitted rough-in inspection
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- Dry-fitting the drain body and confirming grate position
- Blocking between studs for grab bars and the panel
- Marking valve and supply heights to your chosen fixtures
Set the drain to the tile layout — not the tile to the drain.
Roughing the drain before finalizing the tile layout. A linear drain against the wrong wall, or a point drain a few inches off-center, forces ugly tile cuts and standing water forever. Lay out your tile on paper first, then set the drain to it. This is the one thing you cannot cheaply fix after Week 4.
“The door goes in last, the drain goes in first, and the week nobody sees — waterproofing — is the one that decides if any of it lasts.”VIGO Site Journal · Rule of the Remodel
Waterproofing: The Invisible Week That Matters Most
Nobody photographs waterproofing for the reveal, and it is the week a remodel most often fails silently. Backer board goes up, the shower pan gets its slope (a minimum of 1/4 inch per foot toward the drain), a bonded membrane wraps the whole wet area, and every corner and drain flange gets sealed. Then you flood test the pan for 24 hours before a single tile is set.
Get help with
- Mortar-bed pan builds and complex curbless thresholds
- Bonding the membrane to a linear drain flange correctly
- Any shower you are not fully confident sealing yourself
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- Sheet or foam-board membrane systems on a curbed shower
- Sealing seams, corners, and pipe penetrations
- Running and documenting the 24-hour flood test
Do not rush the cure. Waterproofing products have real cure windows — skipping them to “get to tile” is how a beautiful bathroom leaks into the ceiling below within a year. This week has no fixture delivery; it is entirely about the parts you will never see again. Treat the flood test as non-negotiable, even when the schedule is tight.
Skipping the flood test. It is the only chance to catch a pan or drain-flange leak before you bury it under tile. A failed test now is an afternoon fix; the same leak found after tile is a full demo of the shower floor. Twenty-four hours of patience buys twenty years of dry subfloor.
Tile: Where The Contemporary Look Lives
Large-format tile — 12 x 24 in. and up — is the signature of a contemporary bath, and it is exactly why the Week 3 drain call mattered. Big tile needs a flat plane, which a linear drain gives you and a point drain fights. Set the field, let the thinset cure, then grout. Rushing between the two is how you pull tiles loose.
Get help with
- Large-format walls (heavy tile, lippage control, back-buttering)
- Curbless shower floors that must drain perfectly
- Book-matched or pattern-critical feature walls
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- Straightforward floor fields and simple subway walls
- Grouting and sealing after the set cures
- Layout dry-runs to center cuts and avoid slivers
Protect what is coming. Once tile is set and grouted, cover the floor before fixtures land. This is also when your finished wall dimensions become real — which is the number the shower door will be measured against in Week 7. Write those finished measurements down; do not trust the framing dimensions from Week 3.
Final-measuring the shower door off the tile before grout cures and walls are checked for plumb. Contemporary frameless doors have tight tolerances. Measure a wall that is 1/4 inch out of plumb as if it were true and the glass will not seat. Confirm plumb, cure, then measure.
Fixtures: Everything But The Door, In Order
Now the room becomes usable. Install in a deliberate sequence so nothing blocks the next step: vanity or sink base → sink → pop-up drain → faucet → shower panel → bath hardware. Toilet goes back in here too. The shower door is the one thing you deliberately leave for last — more on that in Week 7.
Sink first, faucet second, drain in between — then hardware, then walk away from the door.
Get help with
- Wall-mount faucet or panel connections inside the wall
- Final water and gas connections that get inspected
- Heavy stone tops or wall-hung vanity anchoring
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- Vessel sink set, faucet, and pop-up drain assembly
- Mounting the bath hardware set into blocking
- Reinstalling the toilet with a fresh wax ring
Installing hardware into tile with no blocking behind it. Towel bars and grab bars ripped straight out of tile were the reason Week 3 called for in-wall blocking. If you skipped it, you are now drilling into tile and relying on anchors alone — a repair waiting to happen. Plan anchors at rough-in, not at trim-out.
The Shower Door Goes In Last — Here Is Why
The shower door is installed last because it must be measured against the finished, tiled opening, not the rough framing. Tile thickness, grout lines, and out-of-plumb walls all move the real dimensions. Measuring or ordering a frameless door before tile is set is the single most common ordering mistake in a bathroom remodel.
You ordered the Elan door in Week 1 so it would be on-site now — but you do not touch it until the tile has cured and you have confirmed the opening. Measure the finished width at top, middle, and bottom; check both jambs for plumb. A frameless door hides almost nothing, so the glass has to meet a true opening. Then set it, seal the perimeter, and let the silicone cure before first use.
The Punch List
Walk the room with fresh eyes: caulk lines, grout haze, drain flow, cabinet doors that rub, a faucet aerator that spits. Run water in every fixture. Confirm the shower drains cleanly with no pooling — the payoff of the Week 3 and Week 4 work. Fix the small stuff now, while tools are still out and the site is still a site.
Using the shower before the door seal cures. Fresh silicone needs its full cure time (often 24 hours) to seal watertight. A hot shower the same evening you set the glass can break the bead and route water behind the tile — undoing four weeks of waterproofing discipline in one impatient rinse.
When Should You Hire A General Contractor?
Hire a general contractor when the job moves plumbing or gas, changes structure, requires multiple inspections, or needs a schedule you cannot personally manage across 6–8 weeks. Confident DIYers can own demo, tile, and fixture install — but rough-in and waterproofing are where hidden failures get expensive, and many owners hire out exactly those two weeks.
The honest middle path most homeowners land on: hire out Weeks 3 and 4 (rough-in plus waterproofing, the inspected, failure-prone stages) and DIY the rest. A GC also owns the thing amateurs underestimate — scheduling the trades and inspectors so the plumber, tile setter, and inspector do not all show up on the wrong day. That coordination, not any single skill, is what you are really paying for.
The Honest Part: Costs, Timelines & What Goes Wrong
This plan is a framework, not a guarantee. Real budgets and timelines swing hard by region, scope, and what demo uncovers — so we will give you guidance, not invented averages. Here is where remodels genuinely go sideways.
- Costs vary too much to average honestly. Labor rates, tile choices, and fixture counts differ enormously by market. Get three itemized local bids and hold a 15–20% contingency rather than trusting any national “average bathroom” number.
- Timelines assume inspections cooperate. A failed rough-in inspection or a booked-out inspector can add a week on its own. Build slack in; do not promise anyone the room is done by a hard date in Week 6.
- Demo reveals surprises. Rot, old wiring, or a drain not where the plans showed can reset your scope. This is why the contingency exists — and why you demo before finalizing anything you cannot return.
- DIY waterproofing is the riskiest shortcut. It photographs like nothing and fails like everything. If you are unsure, this is the week to hire out even in an otherwise DIY project.
- Long-lead items gate the whole schedule. A shower door or panel ordered in Week 5 instead of Week 1 can idle a finished room for weeks. Order early even though they install late.
Bathroom Remodel FAQ
How long does a contemporary bathroom remodel take?
A full contemporary bathroom remodel realistically runs 6 to 8 weeks from demo to punch list. Roughly one week each for scope and demo, one to two for plumbing and electrical rough-in, one for waterproofing and inspection, one to two for tile, and one for fixtures and the shower door. Cure times and inspections, not labor, set the pace.
Should I use a linear or point drain in a walk-in shower?
Use a linear drain if you want large-format tile and a curbless, one-slope floor; the VIGO Elan 24 in. linear drain (from $84.90) needs a single pitch toward one wall. Choose a point drain like the Elan Square Shower Drain (from $44.90) for smaller budgets and standard curbed showers that pitch four ways to a center.
Do I need a permit to remodel a bathroom?
Usually yes if you move plumbing, add or relocate circuits, or alter framing; cosmetic swaps often do not require one. Permit rules are set locally, so confirm with your building department before demo. Moving a drain or adding a shower panel circuit almost always triggers a rough-in inspection you cannot skip without risking failed resale disclosures.
Why is the shower door installed last in a remodel?
The shower door goes in last because it must be measured against the finished, tiled opening, not the rough framing. Tile thickness, out-of-plumb walls, and grout lines all shift the real dimensions. Installing or even final-measuring a frameless door like the VIGO Elan before tile is set is the single most common ordering mistake in a remodel.
When should I hire a general contractor instead of DIY?
Hire a general contractor when the job involves moving plumbing or gas, structural changes, multiple inspections, or a schedule you cannot personally manage across 6 to 8 weeks. Confident DIYers can handle demo, tile, and fixture install, but waterproofing and drain rough-in are where hidden failures are costly. Many owners hire out rough-in and finish the rest themselves.
Order Early. Install In Order. Door Last.
Every fixture in this build log ships free sitewide with a limited lifetime warranty — the drains, the sink, the faucet, the shower panel, and the frameless door that goes in last. Start your Week 1 orders now.
— The VIGO Team
