Master Suite Remodel: Bathroom, Bedroom and Closet - New Braunfels, TX

This one usually gets filed as a bathroom. The bathroom is the biggest piece of it, but the job was the whole master suite: the bath came out to the studs and got rebuilt, the bedroom next door got a new floor, new base and a board and batten wall, and the closet got a built-in system from the floor up. Same crew, same trip, one set of drop cloths.

The first thing people notice in this New Braunfels master bathroom is the veining. Long gray runs across a white field, floor to ceiling, the way a good slab of marble looks. It is not marble. It is large-format porcelain, and that was a deliberate call. Porcelain does not etch when a bottle of cleaner gets left sitting on it, it does not need resealing, and it holds up to the daily routine of a bathroom two people share. You get the look without signing up for the maintenance.

The shower carries the same tile up the walls in big panels, which keeps the grout lines few and far apart. Glass doors and matte black hardware handle the rest, and the tub sits inside that same tiled area with the shower. The floor and the shower pan are hex tile, small enough to slope correctly toward the drain and to give bare feet something to hold onto. Two different tile formats in one room, each doing the job it is actually good at.

The vanity wall carries a dual vanity with matte black fixtures. A second sink is not just a bigger cabinet. The supply and drain lines behind the wall have to be laid out for two, and on a remodel that plumbing rework is usually what sets the pace for everything downstream of it. Nobody sees any of it when the room is finished, which is exactly the point.

Out in the bedroom and the closet the work is quieter. New flooring and base run the room, and a board and batten wall gives it something to look at that is not another coat of paint. The closet is painted MDF built to the walls it sits in: hanging at two heights, a bank of drawers, and cubbies sized for shoes instead of whatever depth a box-store kit comes in. A sliding barn door connects the two rooms, which is the right call in a bedroom where a swing door would have eaten the wall the dresser wanted.

Most of the work in a bathroom at this level happens before any of it is visible. Tile that size is unforgiving about a flat substrate, so the walls get made flat first. Waterproofing goes on behind the tile and gets checked before a single sheet is set, because that is the one thing you cannot come back and fix later without tearing the room apart again. And the glass does not get ordered until the tile is in and we can measure the real opening. Bathroom walls are never as square as the plan says they are.

Two numbers belong on this page and they are not the same number. The $25,000 to $50,000 band is DH's contracted scope: our labor, and the materials that came through us, across the bath, the bedroom and the closet. The homeowner bought a number of the finish materials and fixtures on their own: the vanity, the tub and the mirrors all came from them, so we set and hung pieces they had already paid for and none of that material showed up in our number. Add what they spent directly and we put the whole project somewhere around $50,000 to $75,000. That second figure is our estimate of the total rather than a line off an invoice, and it is the one to measure your own project against.

Where your version lands depends on how much of the tile is large-format, whether the plumbing has to move, what the glass runs, and how much of the fixture list you buy yourself. If you are thinking through your own master suite and want an honest read on what it would cost, we are glad to walk it with you.