Reglazing a bathtub in a condo or apartment

Everything about a bathroom gets harder inside a building. The same work that is a morning in a house becomes a question of elevators, parking permits, quiet hours, a board that wants notice, and neighbors on three sides of you. Which is precisely why refinishing makes more sense in a condo than almost anywhere else.

What replacing a tub means on the third floor

It is worth being concrete about this, because the quotes rarely are.

To take a tub out you have to remove the bottom course of tile or the lower section of the surround, disconnect the drain and the overflow from below, cut the old unit up or carry it out whole, bring the new one in, set it, tie it back into the plumbing, rebuild the wall, retile, regrout, and seal. In a house that is a week and a lot of dust. In a condo it is a week and a lot of dust plus a service elevator reservation, a certificate of insurance for the association, a dumpster you may not be allowed to place, water shut off to a stack that other people are on, and a noise schedule that means the crew can work from nine to four and not a minute either side.

And in a very large number of units there is a further problem: the tub and the walls are one molded piece. There is no removing the tub by itself, because the tub is the walls. The whole enclosure has to come out, and a one-piece enclosure does not fit through a bathroom door. It gets cut up inside the room.

What refinishing means instead

Two people, a van, and a drop cloth through the lobby.

• Nothing is removed and nothing is demolished.
• No water is shut off, so nobody else in the stack is affected.
• There is no debris, so no dumpster and no permit conversation about one.
• No other trades, because there is no plumbing and no tiling to follow on.
• Three to five hours, in a single visit.
• Then twenty-four hours before the tub is used.

From the building's point of view almost nothing happened. From your point of view the bathroom looks new. That asymmetry is the entire reason this trade does so well in buildings.

The board, the HOA and the lease

We are not going to tell you what your association allows, because every set of CC&Rs is different and ours is not the signature on them. What we can tell you is which questions make the conversation short.

• Is this an alteration or is it maintenance? Most boards treat work that does not touch plumbing, structure or common elements very differently from work that does. Refinishing touches none of the three.
• Do you need a certificate of insurance? Many buildings do, as a matter of course, for any vendor. Ask before the day rather than at the front desk.
• Are there working hours? Ours are Monday to Saturday, 7 AM to 7 PM, which fits inside almost every building's window, but the window is worth confirming.
• If you rent: this is your landlord's surface, not yours. Get it in writing before you book anything, however obviously improving it the work is.

The ventilation question, which is different in a unit

Condo bathrooms very often have no window. That changes how the day is set up, and it is worth asking about rather than assuming.

We bring a blower fan exhaust and run it for the whole job. In a room with a window it goes in the window and pushes the vapor outside. In an interior bathroom the room still gets sealed and vented, but the planning matters more, and so does keeping the rest of the home clear while it is happening.

The products are low-VOC — Hawk and Topkote — and for occupied units there is an odor-reducing additive. Neither of those means there is no smell, and we would rather say that plainly than have you find out. The full version of that answer is worth reading before you decide whether to be home.

Two bathrooms, one visit

A lot of the condos we work in have two bathrooms, and when the owner is doing one they almost always do both. There is a practical reason beyond the obvious: with both bathrooms done on the same day, the unit has no mismatched surfaces in it, which matters a great deal if it is about to go on the market or back on a rental listing.

It also solves the twenty-four hour problem. One bathroom at a time means the household loses a shower for a day. Both at once means losing them both for the same day rather than two separate days, which most people prefer once they have thought about it.

Where this matters most

Across the areas we cover, the densest concentration of this kind of work is in the newer condominium stock in Irvine, and in the apartment buildings that went up across Bellflower, Long Beach and Anaheim from the mid-1970s on. Those buildings are full of one-piece fiberglass and acrylic enclosures, which are both entirely refinishable and effectively impossible to replace without taking the bathroom apart.

If you own more than one unit, the arithmetic changes again — we wrote about what this looks like at portfolio scale, including doing a whole building in one color so that a surface replaced in one unit matches the one next door.

What to tell us when you call

Whether the tub and walls are one piece or separate, which floor you are on, whether there is a window in the bathroom, whether anyone will be home, and whether the building wants anything from us in advance. That is five answers and it is usually enough to schedule the whole thing.

Residential work carries a five-year written warranty; commercial work carries two. The estimate is free.