Host: Thirteen Ten WIBA and The Home Remodeling Show is brought to you by Edge Construction. The website is EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, EdgeConstructionCompany.com. There is always great information there, and there is always something new going up. Today especially, if you have not been there recently, you definitely want to head over. We are going to be talking about a recent project they completed at Edge Construction. It is titled “Main Bathroom,” and we are going to talk about some of the details of that remodel, along with bathroom renovation in general. Of course, we are talking this morning with Mike Twohig, owner of Edge Construction. Mike, how are you doing this week? Mike: Great, Sean. Good to see you. Host: I mentioned the website, EdgeConstructionCompany.com. I have not mentioned the telephone number, which is 608-636-3343. That number is 636-EDGE. How did you come up with that, by the way? Mike: We actually reached out to our carrier and said, “Can you give us some options for this?” We thought 636-EDGE would be a good way to do it, but we did not know what was open. They helped us out. Host: That is awesome. And the nice thing is, who knew EDGE would actually work out that way? We are going to be talking bathroom renovation and getting into some of the checklist items and things to think about. But first I do want to talk about this recently posted main bathroom remodel at EdgeConstructionCompany.com. I wrote the word down before we came on the air today: “normal.” That is an important term here, because one of the more profound things you have said over the years is that most people live in normal land. This ties right into that. Let us talk about this bathroom. Mike: We fall into that trap too. When you post pictures, you want to post your very best stuff, the fancy projects. But a lot of people do not live in those kinds of houses. They live in normal land. Look at how many smaller houses there are in Madison. This is one of them. It is a very nice late-eighties house, and the bathroom was pretty indicative of the original design. They just wanted an update. Things were starting to wear a bit, and it was a very nice one to do. Just because you live in normal land does not mean you do not have choices or cannot pick out cool stuff. One thing I do not want to forget is the tub. It is a fiberglass tub and shower unit, but if you look at it, the tub looks so much different now. We have access to color tubs that make the absolute most out of the space you give them. They are deeper, wider, and hold more water, and you can kind of tell when you are looking at it that it is a different deal. It certainly looks different than the standard ones that used to get put in, and maybe still get put in a little too often. These are really nice, and we have people stop in for this stuff all the time. Host: I can see why. I was looking at it and it is just really, really great. I think we actually have that one on our short list for folks who want to stop in. You are right off the Beltline, kind of Monona or Madison technically? Mike: We are Monona, but literally right across the street. I do not know how they carved up the city over there. The line is definitely not straight. Host: That is why I had to ask. With this project, you mentioned the tub and surround, and that seems like part of what drove the project. I had commented before the show that the previous bathroom did not look terrible to me. Sometimes when I think of remodeling a bathroom, I picture something totally falling apart. The photo did not look awful, but you mentioned the previous bath was not holding up particularly well, and that is not a unique problem, right? Mike: Right. Those older fiberglass tub units, especially the builder-grade ones, tend to wear out. I am sure you have seen it. The finish gets dull and starts to wear off. The fixtures they put in were not that great. If you get thirty years, maybe a little more, out of that stuff, you are probably pretty lucky. Then the floors start to get soft on those tubs, and that actually drives a lot of remodeling. Once you are pulling out that tub unit and doing something different, then you are probably doing flooring, and you are going to update as much plumbing as you can get at, and pretty soon you are into a bathroom remodel. Host: There is definitely something about a tub that you can clean but that never fully looks clean. Even when you know it is clean, it still does not look clean. Mike: Exactly. Host: Let us talk about what the process looked like. Obviously, important things like the tub needed replacement, and then there was the overall upgrade. What did that conversation look like as far as getting it started? Mike: They had owned the house for a while and knew they wanted to make a change. This one was top on their list. I think the fixtures were really driving it, and I know they did not like the design anymore. The basic layout of the bath was fine. We actually did not change it, which is a budget-friendly option. A lot of times we have to move things, open walls, move plumbing, or fix something the original builder did that just never made sense. The longer you live in a house, the more those things bug you. But here, we did not have to do any of that. It was more about re-fixturing, redoing the tile floor, updating the cabinet tops, and all that stuff. It was a fairly quick design period for this bathroom because there just was not as much to decide. We were not picking out tile for a shower because it was a fiberglass unit. We had that in our showroom, so they could get a good look at it and say, “Okay, this is what I want.” Then our designers helped with the cabinets, tops, and new tile floor. Host: One of the things I noticed is how clean the cabinetry looks. The painted cabinets just look amazing. And maybe doing this show with you over time has changed the way I look at things, but my eye goes right to how straight, crisp, and aligned everything looks. You can tell there was a lot of work and thought that went into making all those pieces fit together perfectly. Mike: That is a testament to good installation. That tile floor, actually, we did that in our own laundry room. It is one of my favorites right now. I do not know how to describe it exactly. You kind of just have to look at it on the website. But yes, what you are noticing is how the cabinet doors and drawers line up. Believe it or not, they do not usually show up from the factory that good. Our people are very good installers, and they take their time and really make that stuff look good. I know the level of cabinetry this is, and it is a really good cabinet, but a really good carpenter can take a really good cabinet and make it look excellent. Some of the cheaper brands and lines, you spend a lot of time trying to make them look like this, and in the end you probably would have been better off just buying a better cabinet and not putting all that extra labor into it. So yes, it is a little more of a bite at first, but that is one reason we pick the cabinets we pick. Host: And I think painted cabinets really show every little imperfection. With older woodgrain cabinets, it probably hid things a little more. Mike: Very much so. There is also a style difference. The older cabinets were what we call partial overlay, where the doors and drawers are smaller and you see more of the cabinet behind them. The newer style, which has been really popular for years now, is more full overlay. The doors and drawers are kind of all you see, and you do not see much of the cabinet behind them. There is nothing wrong with partial overlay, by the way. But full overlay definitely makes it tougher to align everything and make it look great. Host: You mentioned the tile floor, and you have used that one elsewhere too. Mike: Yes, like I said, it is in our own laundry. It is one of my favorites. When it first showed up and I was going to install it myself, I was a little nervous because it is kind of an octagon with a cross tile connecting everything. Any time you are bringing two tile shapes together in a design, you worry because tile is not perfectly consistent. It gets fired in an oven, things move a little, and no two pieces are exactly the same. But I was happy. It was a decent install. It was not as torturous as I thought it was going to be when my wife picked it out. It turned out great, and it was even a little forgiving. It is a nicely manufactured product. Host: Tile really is just one of those classic bathroom materials. A lot of other products are trying to imitate the look, but when you walk on a real tile floor, you know it is the real deal. Mike: It is. We have done plenty of luxury vinyl products, and they are great in the right place. People used to sell them as waterproof, or at least water-resistant, and the material itself is fine. If you put a piece in a bucket of water, it is not going to get wrecked. But in a bathroom, the reason tile is a better product is that tile is more solid and direct for that use. LVP has joints. Whether it locks together or gets glued down, there are still seams. If water sits there, it can seep through. And even on tile floors, if water is sitting on the floor, you should towel it up. Do not leave it sitting for a long time because you do not want moisture getting beneath whatever is on top of that floor. The floor doing the real work is underneath the tile or underneath the vinyl. Host: For folks who decide to go with tile, and I do not know why you would not, I would definitely recommend heated floors. Does that have to be tile, or can you use other materials? Mike: Tile is best for that. We get asked all the time, and tile is king there. There are great systems now for heated floors. We have one in our house for the first time ever, and I have said to my wife that we actually undersold how great it is. They are fairly reasonable systems to run, low voltage, and you can put them on a smart thermostat. So if you get up at six, you can have it start warming up at five-thirty and have it quit by seven or whatever works for you. It does not have to run all day. It is not really a primary source of heat, although we have used it that way in some places and it worked well. But I cannot overstate how nice heated floors are. Everybody has a budget and you have to stay smart, but they sure are nice. Host: As we talk about some of the great things that can be done in a bathroom remodel, there are the things you see and then the things you do not see. We also talk a lot about lighting in kitchens, but in bathrooms lighting is definitely not something to overlook either. Mike: Not at all. Traditionally, and maybe your house is like this because mine was, you had one bigger light over the sink and mirror, and that light had to do all the heavy lifting. A lot of bathrooms still only have that when we go in to remodel them. At the bare minimum, we are going to replace that fixture and put in what we call a shower can, basically an LED light in the shower, which is really nice to have. Then we evaluate whether there are any dead zones where it just does not feel like enough light. It is pretty easy to add another recessed LED. We can also do a fan light. We use nice Panasonic fans. They move a ton of air, they are pretty quiet, and we can add a light there too. That gives a softer light and works really well in some bathrooms. Some master baths are just kind of weirdly shaped, and you might have the sink and light fixture over here, the shower way over there, and then a dead zone in between. A fan light can help with that. Host: In some of those smaller bathrooms, especially ones with no window, good lighting really seems like it would make the room feel bigger and more comfortable. Mike: Oh yeah. Our theory in general is that we want to daylight spaces, whether it is a basement, great room, bedroom, or bathroom, and then give you control over it. Windows in bathrooms can actually be challenging for remodels because they can hem you into certain designs. Sometimes the best place for a new tile walk-in shower is right where the window is. Most people do not want to give up anything, so then it becomes, “How do we keep the window and not have water problems?” Well, you have to make some choices. The light from that window is great about six months of the year here in Wisconsin, but then it is dark when you get up and dark when you get home, so you still need to daylight the room in another way. You want the right amount of light, though. In a bathroom it can look weird if it is too much, so that is where the designers are helpful. Dale, our master electrician, is very experienced, and we really take a team approach. At rough stage, when we are running wires and picking locations before drywall, the designer, Dale, and the homeowner are all brainstorming together. Dale might say, “Let us put one here,” and the designer might say, “Hang on, I am not sure that is the right idea.” You need that meeting of the minds. Some owners want a lot of light as long as they can control it, and that works great. Host: One thing I have learned from you over the years is that if you mention a brand name, there is a reason. You casually mentioned Panasonic with bathroom fans. Those are no joke. There is a reason you call out a specific brand, because bathroom fans really matter, do they not? Mike: They do. They are one of those things that are supposed to do their job without really standing out. Nothing is better than a bath fan that actually works. Sometimes we go into houses and there is mold up in the corners. Usually they have a bath fan that is undersized and so loud nobody wants to turn it on. Or certain family members just refuse to use it. So you get it quiet, get it moving a lot of air, and make people actually want to turn it on. I like timers too. We have them in our house. You can pick how many minutes you want the fan to run after you leave. It is an efficiency thing too. If someone turns the fan on and then wanders off, they may not remember until the next day. If you can set it for twenty minutes, that is great. And by the way, if you are showering and things are getting fogged up, it really should keep running for another twenty or thirty minutes after you get out. The newer stuff is pretty efficient, so it is well worth it to have a good fan operating the way it is supposed to. Host: And it is not just moving air around. That air needs to go out, right? Mike: Absolutely. It needs to go out through the roof or through a soffit, not into the attic. We find that all the time, and that can be disastrous. We have had houses where that led to many thousands of dollars in repairs. Sometimes we are not even there for that reason. We might be up there running wires and discover the fans are vented into the attic. That creates a ton of humidity up there. Cold meets warm, and you end up with moisture. If that is happening in the roof above the insulation, that is a terrible thing. You are going to get rot. We have had to do truss fixes, tear plaster off, tear roofs apart, and even if you just shingled it last year or yesterday, sometimes all of that still has to come off and be dealt with. So make sure whoever is doing the work knows what they are doing, and ask the right questions. Make sure it is vented out. Host: Who knew bath fans could be so important and so interesting? We are talking this morning with Mike Twohig, owner of Edge Construction. The website is EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, EdgeConstructionCompany.com. The telephone number is 608-636-3343, or 636-EDGE. We are talking bathroom remodels and bathroom renovation checklists, and focusing on a recent project because it is such a good example of a really nice, very well done, but pretty normal remodeling project. One thing that stood out to me is that this is not a tiled shower. It is a surround, but it still looks really, really good. Is that by Kohler as well? Mike: Yes, and when you are not picking the budget-basement stuff, a lot of these products are going to look fairly similar at first. The finish may look exactly the same from one to another. A lot of plumbing products in America come from one faraway place, and I am not saying it is all bad, but it can be a minefield. From my standpoint, I have to ask whether it is really worth saving a couple hundred bucks on something like that surround and not really knowing what you are getting, versus using a Wisconsin product like Kohler. Great company, very innovative. I talked about how much tubs have changed, how much deeper they are, and how much more room they have while still using the same amount of space. It is just better design. Somebody else is probably copying it already, but for me these products need to stand the test of time. You do not know what is going to drive the next remodel. If twenty or thirty years down the road that tub and surround are still going strong, then they did not force the issue. To me, that is efficient and that is green. If it lasts longer, it is not the thing that forces the next remodel. Host: That is a great point. And on the tile side, you have talked before about how the tile itself is only part of the story. Mike: Right. There is always another level to everything. There have never been more choices in tile than there are today. If you come into our showroom, we pull from all of our suppliers and build an inventory there. We have several hundred tile samples, probably more. We want tiles that fit into budgets and still look cool. Some of the trendy stuff we pull in too, especially if I think it is a trend that is going to be around for a long time. If we pull in a cool tile that costs fifty dollars a square foot, it is probably not very budget-friendly. Believe it or not, you are not getting a ten-times-better tile than the five-dollar tile. Usually it is a unique design, maybe produced in small lots, maybe it traveled a long way. Good designers help find a really similar look in a tile that is more budget-friendly and easier to get. And sometimes with those really expensive tiles, you end up with other problems too. Maybe you cannot get them consistently, or the manufacturing is a little less reliable. The other piece is what happens behind the tile. I learned from my uncles, who were in flooring, and they always said the tile you see is just the artwork. The real shower is behind the tile. That is where we use Schluter membranes and Kerdi waterproofing systems. That is what makes sure the shower is going to last a long time. Host: You have also used the term “blocking” over the years, like when you are preparing for towel bars and things like that. Those are little things homeowners never see but that really matter. Mike: Absolutely. We want to block for the future too. If we are doing a tile shower, we put in two-by-six, two-by-eight, or two-by-ten blocks all the way around so that if in the future someone wants to add a grab bar, they can. A few years ago I got a call from somebody and they said, “You did my shower at least twenty years ago and you told us you blocked for grab bars back then. Did you really do that?” And yes, we did. You do not always realize it at the time, but you are doing your future self a huge favor. That is one of the cool things about working with a thoughtful contractor. Those little extra things may not matter until twenty years later, and then suddenly they matter a lot. Host: It is a great day to start that conversation with Edge Construction. Their website is EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is EdgeConstructionCompany.com, all one word. The telephone number is 608-636-3343, or 636-EDGE. Before we wrap up, we should probably touch on toilets. Are they getting better? Mike: They are. There is not a lot that is truly brand new, but everything is getting better. Heated seats have been around. Fans to take away the smell have been around. Self-cleaning features have been around. Bluetooth speakers, bidet functions, all of that. I do think they are getting more efficient every year, and I love walking through Kohler’s display at the International Builders’ Show because they always have people there explaining what they have changed and improved. The self-cleaning part is much bigger than I thought it would be. A lot of people really like that. And yes, it is funny to think toilets can be dated, but they can be. Host: Are you seeing people prep for some of those features, even if they are not installing them right away? Mike: Yes. People may not want to do it now, but they want the option. You can do add-ons later, and some of the aftermarket bidet seats are actually pretty fancy. But you need power, and you need warm water to make that work. So yes, we prep for that stuff. Host: We also talked a bit about basement bathrooms. People really are adding those a lot more now, aren’t they? Mike: They are. It is probably partly a result of COVID, but we have done a lot of basement finishes in the last four or five years. If you have a newer house, maybe built in the last fifteen or twenty years, the builder probably roughed in the bathroom when the house was built. “Roughing in” just means they put in the stuff you do not normally see. Usually that means the drains under the concrete. The hot and cold water supplies are easy to run later, but the drains are what matter. Fast forward ten years and a lot of people think, “I do not know why they put the bathroom there,” because the layout is not exactly how they want it. But about half the time now, we actually break up a little concrete and move that bath around a bit. We are usually not moving it forty feet across the basement, but maybe around a corner. It is not as big a deal as people think. Host: And in some older homes, there is just that random toilet sitting in the middle of the basement. Mike: Yes, exactly. And sometimes that weird toilet turns out to be really handy. A lot of the small houses in Madison and Monona only have one bathroom. If we are remodeling that bathroom upstairs, people suddenly get very thankful for that basement toilet. And there have definitely been times when we built a bathroom around one because it was in a good enough spot and the homeowner said, “You know what? We need another bath. Let us just do it here.” Host: It is a great reminder that a lot of these bathroom conversations are not just about what looks nice, but about how the home works better now and later. Mike: Exactly. That is really what good remodeling is about.