✦ September Bathroom Event — free design consultation plus one premium upgrade included. Book by September 30. Call (520) 548-2125 left
Bathroom Design & Build
Walk-in showers, freestanding tubs, double vanities and floor-to-ceiling tile — built on waterproofing you will never see and will never have to think about again.
Ends September 30 · left
Sign a full bathroom remodel by September 30 and pick one premium upgrade, included at no cost. Not a discount — an actual upgrade to the finished room, specified and installed as part of the build.
Custom-templated to your finished walls after tile. The single upgrade that most changes how a bathroom reads.
Electric in-floor heat under the tile, on its own thermostat. Impossible to retrofit later without pulling the floor up again.
A step up in cabinetry and countertop material — the two things you touch every morning for the next fifteen years.
One upgrade per household, on full bathroom remodels signed by September 30, 2026. Upgrade is specified during design and installed with the project; it cannot be exchanged for a credit or discount. Consultations and written estimates are always free and carry no obligation.
A bathroom is the one room in a house where a hidden mistake is guaranteed to surface. Not immediately — that is the problem. A shower built on inadequate waterproofing looks flawless for two or three years, and then shows itself as a dark line on the hall baseboard on the other side of the wall.
By then the fix is not regrouting. It is demolition of a bathroom you paid to have built.
So the part of our bathroom work we are most particular about is the part nobody photographs: the pan, the slope, the waterproofing membrane, the way the membrane turns up the wall and how it is terminated at the curb or the linear drain. We flood-test showers before tile goes on. It costs a day. It is the cheapest insurance in the entire project.
The second thing worth knowing in Tucson: as in kitchens, our slab-on-grade construction means that moving a toilet or relocating a shower drain is concrete work. A bathroom that keeps its plumbing locations and changes everything else can be a spectacular room for a fraction of what a full reconfiguration costs. Sometimes the reconfiguration is worth it anyway — a cramped 1970s hall bath with a linen closet in the wrong place is often unfixable without moving something. We will tell you which situation you are in.
The Tucson detail nobody mentions
Tucson's water is hard — meaningfully so. It affects a bathroom more than any other room, every single day.
Polished chrome, clear glass shower enclosures and dark matte finishes show mineral spotting almost immediately. Brushed nickel, satin brass, and low-iron glass with a factory-applied protective coating hide it far better. Frameless glass is beautiful and we install a lot of it — it also needs squeegeeing, and you should choose it knowing that rather than discovering it.
If you are already opening walls, a whole-home softener loop is an inexpensive rough-in at this stage and an expensive retrofit later. We raise it on every bathroom project.
Scope
Linear drains, properly sloped pans, and a threshold you can roll or step across without thinking about it. Curbless on a slab requires either a recessed pan or a raised floor — decided at design, because it changes the whole floor plane.
Freestanding tubs need a floor that can carry them full and a filler strategy — floor-mounted, wall-mounted or deck. Each has a different rough-in that must be set before tile.
Double vanities, custom millwork, integrated or undermount basins, drawer banks that clear the plumbing. Storage is the thing clients say they underestimated most often.
Floor-to-ceiling tile, large-format porcelain, natural stone, mosaic niches and benches. Layout is drawn before it is set so cuts land where they should.
In-floor heat, proper exhaust ventilation sized to the room, layered lighting and dimming, mirror and vanity lighting that works for shaving and makeup rather than against them.
Blocking for future grab bars, wider doorways, comfort-height fixtures and zero-threshold entry — built in so the room ages with you without ever looking like it was designed to.
Where Bathrooms Go Wrong
Every one of these is a repair we have been hired to undo on someone else's work. All five are preventable at build.
The membrane stops at tile height instead of continuing up behind the board, so water tracks behind the assembly at the top of the pan. Shows up as a stain on the far side of the wall two years later.
The finished tile slopes to the drain but the waterproofing layer beneath it is flat, so water that penetrates the grout sits on the membrane indefinitely instead of draining. Grout is not waterproof — it never was, and it is not supposed to be.
A shampoo niche framed after the fact, cut into a wall with a pipe or a stud where the niche wants to be, then waterproofed as an afterthought. Niches are the most common leak point in a shower and the easiest to get right if drawn first.
Alarmingly common in older Tucson homes — the fan runs, the moisture goes into the roof cavity instead of outdoors, and the ceiling above stays quietly damp. Ventilation must terminate outside the building. We check this on every bathroom we open.
Frameless glass is measured to the built opening. If walls are out of plumb and nobody corrected it, the glass either doesn't fit or fits with a wedge-shaped silicone gap. Correction happens at framing, not at glass.
Relocating a toilet means a new drain line under concrete. On a post-tension slab that requires scanning and engineering before any cut. Discovering this after demolition has begun is how a bathroom stalls for three weeks.
How It Runs
We look at the existing room, the wall it shares, and where the plumbing actually is. Free, and honest about what your layout will and won't allow.
Tile layout drawn, fixtures specified, niche and bench positions set. Fixture selection has to be final before rough-in, because rough-in dimensions are fixture-specific.
New or relocated fixtures, new electrical and ventilation changes require a permit. We file with the correct jurisdiction for your address.
Down to studs and slab. Plumbing and electrical roughed in, blocking installed for vanities, glass, grab bars and anything hung on a wall. Rough inspection here.
Pan built and sloped, membrane installed and turned up the walls, then the shower is flooded and held. We do not tile over an untested pan.
Tile set to the drawn layout, fixtures trimmed out, then glass templated to the finished walls and installed on return. Walkthrough and punch list before final invoice.
Straight Answers
Tucson market ranges for permitted, professionally built bathrooms in 2026. A large share of every number below is the work behind the surfaces, which is exactly where it should be.
| Scope | Typical Tucson Range | What Drives It |
|---|---|---|
| Guest / hall bath — builder-grade refresh | $18,000 – $35,000 | Prefabricated or simply tiled shower, stock vanity, quality fixtures, new floor. Plumbing stays put. The most common project we do and the best value in the range. |
| Primary bath — mid-range | $35,000 – $65,000 | Custom tiled shower, semi-custom cabinetry, upgraded stone, frameless glass, minor plumbing modification. Improved lighting, ventilation and storage throughout. |
| Primary bath — luxury | $65,000 – $120,000+ | Curbless shower, freestanding tub, custom millwork, heated floors, full layout redesign, natural stone and premium fittings. |
| Powder room | $9,000 – $22,000 | Small room, but the cost per square foot is the highest in the house — every square foot is finished surface and there is no cheap filler space. |
| Toilet or shower drain relocation (add-on) | $3,500 – $9,000 | Saw-cut, excavate, re-route, inspect, re-pour. Add scanning and engineering on a post-tension slab. |
| Convert tub to curbless shower | $14,000 – $32,000 | Includes recessing or building up the floor plane, linear drain, full waterproofing and glass. The single most requested accessibility upgrade in Tucson. |
A useful rule locally: two identical-looking bathrooms can differ by $20,000 purely on whether fixtures moved. Compare against every other service on the Tucson remodeling cost guide.
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Straight Answers
A guest or hall bathroom typically runs $18,000–$35,000. A mid-range primary bathroom runs $35,000–$65,000. Luxury primary bathrooms with curbless showers, freestanding tubs and custom millwork start around $65,000.
A large share of that is labour and materials behind the finished surfaces — waterproofing, plumbing, electrical, blocking and ventilation. That is not padding. It is the part that determines whether the room is still sound in fifteen years.
Three to six weeks on site for most bathrooms, and six to ten for a full primary suite with a curbless shower or relocated plumbing.
One scheduling item surprises people: frameless shower glass is templated after tile is complete and typically takes one to two weeks to fabricate. That gap is real and unavoidable, so we schedule around it rather than pretending it isn't there.
Replacing a toilet in the same location, or swapping a vanity without touching the supply and drain, generally does not require a permit in the City of Tucson.
Adding or moving any fixture, running new electrical, installing a new exhaust fan, or altering walls does require one. Most full bathroom remodels are permitted, and we file with the correct authority — City of Tucson, Pima County, or your town, which have genuinely different requirements.
Yes, and it is one of the most requested upgrades we do in Tucson. There are two ways to achieve it and they cost very differently.
You can recess the slab — cutting and lowering the concrete in the shower footprint, which is the cleanest result and the more expensive route. Or you can raise the finished floor of the bathroom to meet the required slope, which avoids concrete work but changes the threshold into the room and any door swing.
On a post-tension slab, recessing requires scanning and engineering first. We establish which slab you have before we design the room, not after.
They are beautiful and they photograph superbly, and we install plenty. Two honest caveats.
First, cleaning around and behind one is a genuine chore that nobody mentions in the showroom. Second, if this is the only tub in a house with small children, bathing a toddler in a freestanding tub with a floor-mounted filler is less comfortable than it looks.
If the room can carry both a freestanding tub and a proper shower, it is a wonderful choice. If it is a tub-or-shower decision in your only full bathroom, think about the next ten years of actual use.
If you are already opening walls, the rough-in for a softener loop is inexpensive now and disproportionately expensive to retrofit later. We raise it on every project.
Tucson's water is hard enough that it visibly affects glass, fixtures and finishes within weeks, and it shortens the life of water heaters and fixture cartridges. It is one of the few upgrades that pays back in maintenance rather than just in appearance.
Yes — and the trick is doing it at build rather than as a retrofit. Blocking behind the tile for future grab bars costs almost nothing during framing and means a bar can be added anywhere, later, in a finish that matches the room.
A curbless entry, a wider door, comfort-height fixtures, a bench in the shower and a handheld on a slide bar are all things that simply read as a well-designed modern bathroom. Nobody walking in would identify any of them as accessibility features.
Waterproofing that stops too low, or slope built into the tile but not into the layer beneath it. Both look perfect on handover and both fail in year two or three.
The second most common is an exhaust fan venting into the attic instead of outdoors, which is widespread in older Tucson homes. We check it on every bathroom we open and correct it as a matter of course.
Free in-home consultation, honest guidance on what your layout allows, and waterproofing we flood-test before a single tile goes on.