Alpharetta, GA quality bathroom remodel walk through.

Our powerful bathroom remodel in Alpharetta, GA that we are proud to have provided for our client.

This week I was excited to have a planned walk through of a bathroom remodel in Alpharetta, GA we finished after Christmas. We were called on to finish the bathrooms upstairs and while we were there, I wanted to be sure to get the final piece to a bunch of content I had accumulated over a couple of months.

We’ve been remodeling bathrooms for quite a few years now and I never cease to get excited for the final project blog post and walk through. We do still get a kick out of our work!

It’s pretty difficult making this content. I sit on a bunch of footage and pictures for a long period of time before I can put it all together. Patience, Ben, PATIENCE!

This project turned out incredible. It is one of our favorites. It was a very technical project requiring all of our skills and foresight. It took just about about one month to complete. Seemed a bit longer in hindsight because it was done between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Everything takes longer that time of year! We did quite a few incredible bathroom remodels last year and this one was a cherry on top of 2019.

Our client Jerry had called us and he wanted us specifically for his remodel. I started in with my presentation over the phone, laying it on heavy about what makes us so great, and he said,

“Hey, listen I don’t need you to be a salesman, I know what I want and I want to meet with you guys.”

I was taken aback for a moment and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind,

“You just called me a salesman. I’m honored because most days I feel like a crusty tile guy and I’m covered in thin set!”

A true statement!

We laughed and that broke the ice!

I’ve since changed my approach a little bit, but I can’t help but constantly be differentiating. It’s a crowded field out here and sometimes I admittedly over do it on the initial phone call. My goal is to impress. I’m sure it comes off as wind and bluster at times. Hey, at least I’m trying! I want the opportunity. That’s all it is!

I usually handle the first sales calls and set up the meeting and Jason will take it from there. Our system of me being the promotional guy or the “hype man” as the kids call it, works really well for us. I suppose an advantage of working with us, is that we know our strengths and weaknesses. We’ve been working together long enough to understand that Jason has a great disposition for long term relationships, and I’m more equipped for energy and promotion. Not that I can’t do what he does or vice versa, we just do what works. We work to each others strengths. It’s an advantage of being an established partnership with a long history.

Jerry really valued quality and competence. He seems like the type of man that finds experts and lets them do their thing. I admire him a lot. He’s an entrepreneur and a successful businessman and I walk by his office and he’d be working away, talking on the phone, doing what he does and I think to myself, “Wow, this guy is doing it.” I can’t say I regularly see someone that works as hard as he does. He’s an inspiration to Jason and I. We would take the opportunity to pick his brain whenever we could. I implemented a lot of things he recommended. He is a brilliant marketer so his advice was incredible. I’m glad to have met him. I’m even more honored that he entrusted us with his home.

Jerry and his wife Judy were so kind, they gave our kids gingerbread houses for Christmas. I still remember we had such a good time making them. My Rosie kept eating all the decorations.

Anna, who would sneak off to see us She was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve experienced over these years!

One of the first videos I made about this project was our demolition process video. It goes over how we do a demolition. This is the part most people are worried about. They wonder if their house is going to be damaged or revered. This is where the rubber meets the road and homeowners find out if they hired the right contractor. You can tell on demo day if you did a good job in recruiting.

There’s no mystery as to how we do things because I documented how this one went. This is how we do it every time:

This is what our showers look like before we water proof. This pan is ‘mud’. We let a load of weight off the structure by building that bench out of foam. Before there was about 600lbs of block concentrated on that spot!

We have great coverage in this photo. We try are hardest to get complete thin set coverage under every tile. That effort adds time to these projects, because we are VERY often pulling tiles off the wall and adding thin set, to more fully support the tile. We would get done much faster if we didn’t do this. “How can this project take so long?” This is one part of the reason why!

Then there was this pebble floor. Like always, the pebbles came on a sheet. The pebble were jammed together, not leaving room for grout. Grout has a purpose. It creates a buffer zone between the tiles. When the tiles are jammed together it is unsanitary and allows a place for gunk to hide.

Also, when you put the sheets together, you could see the sheet lines. The pebbles on the sheet were STIFF so they wouldn’t conform to a bowl.

So, we set them one by one. It took us a day and a half because the sheets had big, medium and small sizes.

Tile pebble shower floor in Alpharetta, GA.

This sheet of stone mosaics is so stiff, it leaves us wondering, how is that supposed to conform to the bowl shape in the shower pan. Another reason we take them off the sheet.

Jason, lead tile installer in Alpharetta, GA setting the pebbles one by one. This is a daunting task. We get them done by doing them "ONE PIECE AT TIME!”

Schluter systems drain with tile pebble shower floor in Alpharetta, GA.

These walls were extremely out of whack! Jason had to do a bunch of fixing in order to get them right. The original builders of these homes throw them together with record speed and very little precision. Why wouldn’t they, the material they are putting up doesn’t require an exacting touch. Small ceramic tiles, pretty basic stuff. Loose tolerances on things like framing are acceptable.

We are putting up large format tile, frame-less glass doors, very technical material.

Overall, this shower took a ton of planning in order to get it perfect. I was pretty impressed with Jason on this one. I don’t usually use my brain very much when I’m working with Jason. I’m second in command, taking phone calls, making content, being a helper. He does all the heavy thinking. This one took a lot in order to have it end up like it did. I really was amazed.

When I think of what the ideal project is for us, I think, the most technical project. A project that takes a ton of planning and a lot of brain power to complete. Those are the projects that we are a perfect fit for. Our portfolio is full of those.

A lot of planning went into nailing these angles!

I made a flood test video at this project as well. When we build a shower before we set any tile we fill our pan with water to make sure it operated like it should and holds water with out leaking. We water proofed this shower with a combination of Schluter Kerdi fabric put together with Ardex 8+9, which is how they do it in Europe. It makes the system actually water proof. We put a lifetime craftsmanship guarantee on our work.

This video explains why we do a flood test and was shot on location.

We used a wet saw tent to make sure the water was contained and didn’t impact any of the stuff in Jerry’s garage. It worked out great and it is now a permanent part of our arsenal. We are the guys you hire when you value your property and you don’t want your things destroyed.

I photo of the finished product. What a great improvement. We are really proud of how it turned out and I believe we saved our best remodel for the end of 2019.

I wanted to mention that this was all porcelain tile. The tile on the wall looks like a marble, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not! What a world we live in. You can get something that LOOKS exactly like marble without the maintenance and the hassle that goes along with marble. We always say that most of the good marble has been mined and unless you want to spend BIG BUCKS, steer clear of marble. The supply now has iron deposits that you can’t see, but come through as orange/brown defects after the material is installed. Can you imagine?

Who wants to mess with that HASSLE! Like I said, go with the porcelain, the look of marble, without the pain!

Alpharetta GA, master bathroom tile shower remodel.

The Hamilton Tile team: Ben and Jason. We don’t always get these final photos together, but when we do..it’s pretty neat thinking that these will live on for years to come. Not to mention, we built this! We take pride in what we do. If you can’t tell, I can’t help you! :P

Our recent bathroom remodel in Alpharetta, GA. Look at that before and after! That’s a zinger right there! :)

In the video walk through below, Jason and I go through everything we did on this project. The challenges and what makes what we did different than what every one else does. We even go into what this bathroom cost. Nothing beats a video walk through and you really can’t conceal lousy work when you do a walk through with a quality camera!

I ask you to look at the detail in this bathroom. We really nailed our marks on this one.

Thanks in advance for watching.

I hope this video inspires you to call us for your bathroom remodel. I think we are perfect for your project and I promise we bring this level of finish and care to everything we do.

Alpharetta, GA bathroom shower repair and remodel.

Alpharetta, GA shower repair and remodel.

I started my relationship with these clients in Alpharetta, GA by putting them together a glass back splash. They had found me through the CTEF website. It was a challenging splash as most glass back splashes are. I remember setting up in the driveway, because the house didn’t have a garage, and the week I was there was one of the coldest of the year. Twenty degree temps during the day, mixed with water from the wet saw….made for a miserable install!

About mid way through the job, the homeowner obviously decided I was the installer for him. I should have known he had been bamboozled by someone else, because someone traditionally isn’t going to go on the CTEF site without first being swindled by a careless builder. He brought me to his master bath and from the moment I walked in, I had the eerie feeling of mold and decay. I could smell it faintly. It was an otherwise aesthetically pleasing shower, but with a natural stone shower floor, that I identified as holding water….and a crack in a grout joint on the shower bench. I also noticed all the corners and plane changes were grouted in, which doesn’t accommodate movement in the structure . That’s a major indicator that whoever built it didn’t care, even a little bit.

Immediately, I knew it was a failed shower. I told him so, but also advised him to talk to someone who ‘repaired’ such showers to get another perspective.

What happens in this situation is that the water hits the building material underneath the tile, that wasn’t properly water proofed. The building material expands as it gets wet and drys out, forcing the tile to move, cracking the grout. This shower was only FIVE YEARS OLD. Goes to show you how important water proofing is.

They ended up hiring us to rebuild the bathroom.

Have a look at the photos below. I know I lose jobs to the ‘repair guy’ because of the cost of full replacement. The photos below show you how awfully built this shower was. If a repair person comes in and ‘repairs’ the pan, this house would still have had an atrociously built shower, with a new pan.

We rebuilt the entire bathroom, for the lowest cost, when you acknowledge that they’ll never have to touch it again and that it’s built correctly (waterproof) with modern products and effective techniques. Tile is the least expensive building material over the life of the product, but only when it’s installed properly. That’s where we come in!

There could not be a clearer example of the difference in how we install tile and how “the builder guy” installs. In the professional tile community, the picture above is the worst of the worst. All of the voids where there is no thin set, is a place for water (and bacteria) to hide. Those tiles jumped off the wall with a tap of the hammer.

When you walked into this bathroom all you had to do was use your nose to sniff and you could tell you were in the presence of a failed shower.

NTCA (National Tile Council of North America) states that an installer should get 95% thin set coverage (on the back of the tile) inside of a wet area. When using big tile (or any tile for that matter) you only get 95% coverage by flattening the walls that the tile is going on. The way we do it is by fixing the framing. The picture below is what 95% coverage looks like.

Want to test your installers competence? Ask him what the standard for thin set coverage is inside of a shower? If he doesn’t know or gets that question wrong, don’t hire him.

You may be thinking, “A shower built like this is an anomaly, my builder is a pro.”

We see these type of showers all the time, these are regular occurrences.

Your builder may be a “pro” but what about the guys he sends to your house to do the work? Are they tile specialists? Vet them too!

Below is a picture of a vetted installer. Certified Tile installer #1465.

The box bench in the photo is built out of cinder blocks. The ‘builder’ glued on fiber rock to the front to build it out to where he needed it for a better tile lay out. It was a bio-hazard zone!

Not only that, Imagine the additional weight on the frame of this house because of this bench. Cement is heavy. That’s a problem when houses are built to minimum standards.

Foam alleviates the added weight from the house’s structure which automatically makes your house stronger.

That bench was at least 300 unnecessary pounds.

Yuck.

Below, what you’ll notice is that we completely rebuilt this wall. The previous framing was missing about five studs. it was nailed precariously, plumbing wasn’t secured.

The house we were working in wasn’t some cheap place either, this was a really nice place, owned by very pleasant people..who didn’t deserve the treatment the previous contractor gave them.

That electrical box you see, was a junction buried in the wall that we uncovered during the demolition.. Burying junctions is something electricians lose their licenses over. We made sure it was accessible on the other side of the wall.

We ‘wet shimmed’ these walls to make them plum and flat. We glued these colored spacers on the wall to allow us to be able to screw our Kerdi board the same day. It’s a new technique we were experimenting with. It worked great but took forever! We perfected this technique by using 1/4” plywood plumbed up and flattened, stapled to the inside of the stud. THAT worked perfect!

We use old skills daily and also modify and improve upon existing ones. Jason sometimes comes up with stuff I’m sure is original to him.

All of our showers get a ‘flood test’ as an insurance policy. Fill the pan with water and wait 24 hrs. We’ve never had one fail, but it’s easier to go backwards before tile rather than after. Is your installer giving your shower a ‘flood test’?

“What size is your biggest soap bottle?” Jason asked.

“Oh, here it is, my husband hates how he can’t pump it when it’s in the soap niche.”

These small conversations with our clients ensure they get what they want. These small conversations help us find out their needs.

Tim can now pump his soap because we built him a custom sized soap niche.

It’s part of hiring PEOPLE rather than a BUILDER.

PEOPLE are responsive to your needs, you know them, you interact with them.

A BUILDER sends mystery men to your house, that are generally there to get the job done as quickly as possible and are usually instructed NOT to talk to the homeowner.

One of the final steps is installing toilet paper holders and towel rods..

We put in a corner bench without a front built out of 2” structural foam. It increases the space inside the shower and they are less of an obstruction. The solid box benches are a disaster! They are also the main spot the showers leak. We never penetrate the water proofing to put in one of our benches.

When someone gets defrauded on a shower the custom glass panels cannot be re-used. They are custom built for the shower. Luckily we were able to re-use one panel in this bathroom, saving these folks a bit of money, but generally the glass cannot be salvaged. To the trash they go!

This bathroom main floor had a large crack across the tile. Why did this happen and how did we solve the problem?

The previous builder did not put enough blocking in the floor after he cut out a section. When we took the tile off Jason put his foot through the floor by simply walking on it.

The previous builder was also under the false assumption that cement board adds structural strength. It doesn’t.

We ended up adding another layer of plywood as well as extra wood in the framing to support the weight of tile. To have tile, your house needs to be solidly built. Over engineered.

Before you hire for your next remodeling project, be on the look out for these logos. They signify your tile installer understands the mechanics of tile installation.