Expert Bathroom Remodeling in The Fan, Richmond

The Fan sits in the 23220 zip code, where Census estimates for 2020–2024 put 44.6% of the housing built before 1940 and 59.6% built before 1960. That is the oldest concentration of housing stock we work in. These are narrow rowhouses on narrow lots, and almost none of them were drawn with a bathroom in the plan. The bathrooms you have now were carved out of bedrooms, tucked under stair landings, or added off the back of the house when indoor plumbing arrived. That history decides most of what a remodel here actually costs.

What we run into in The Fan

Because so much of the block went up in the same two or three decades, the same handful of problems turn up again and again once the walls are open:

• Second-floor bathrooms sitting on original joists that were never sized for a cast-iron tub with water and a person in it
• Cast-iron drain stacks running inside masonry party walls, so reaching the stack means opening plaster rather than pulling drywall
• Galvanized supply branches narrowed by decades of scale, which is why the shower drops off the moment a toilet refills
• Floor tile set straight onto plank subfloor with no underlayment, cracking in a dead-straight line above every joist
• Bathrooms narrow enough that the door swing, not preference, dictates where the vanity and toilet can go

Historic district review, and why it comes first

City Council established the Commission of Architectural Review in 1957. It reviews exterior changes to buildings inside the city's Old and Historic Districts, of which there are fourteen, the earliest designated in 1957 and the most recent in 2009. Several of them cover Fan blocks: Monument Avenue was adopted in 1990, West Franklin Streets in 1970, West Grace Street in 1996 and Boulevard in 1992.

Interior work is not what the commission looks at, so the bathroom itself is not its business. The bathroom window is. Removal and installation of windows appears on the commission's own list of the work it most often reviews, and its published guidance puts the certificate of appropriateness ahead of any other permit. The commission meets once a month, on the fourth Tuesday, and on the third Tuesday in December. If your plan leaves the window alone, none of this touches you. If it does not, that one monthly meeting is the item your schedule has to be built around.

Bathroom remodeling services in The Fan

The work we take on in Fan houses, most of it inside footprints that cannot grow:

• Bathroom remodeling
• Bathtub and shower installation
• Bathroom tile installation and repair
• Bathroom plumbing services
• Bathroom vanity and sink installation
• Flooring install and repair

Pricing for bathroom remodeling in The Fan

If you are weighing a bathroom in a Fan rowhouse, call (804) 965-1830 or contact Richmond Bathroom Remodeling and we will come look at the floor structure and the stack before anyone quotes you a number.