Do you work as a bathroom subcontractor for general contractors?

On a whole-house remodel or addition, framing crews, drywall crews, and finish carpenters are generalists who touch every room the same way. Bathrooms are the one room on the job where the assembly tolerances are unforgiving: waterproofing behind tile has to be continuous and tested, slope to drain has to be exact, and the layout has to account for rough-in dimensions that don't move once concrete or tile is set. A crew that frames and finishes bedrooms all week doesn't necessarily carry the daily reps in shower pan slope, curb waterproofing, or niche flashing that a bathroom-only crew carries.

The value we add isn't that your framers or your finish carpenters can't do it — many can — it's that we do it every week and we've already made the mistakes that show up as callbacks two years later. On a job with three or four bathrooms, bringing in a specialist for that portion often nets out faster and with fewer punch-list items than having a generalist finish crew learn shower assembly on your client's dime. It also frees your finish carpenters to keep moving through the rest of the house instead of getting pulled into tile scheduling and waterproofing cure times.

We're most useful on jobs where the bathroom scope is complex enough to justify a specialist — a curbless shower, a layout that's moving plumbing, a tub-to-shower conversion with structural implications — and less necessary on a straightforward like-for-like bathroom refresh that your existing crew can handle without much risk. We'll tell you honestly which category a given bathroom falls into rather than pitching ourselves into scope that doesn't need us.

The single biggest source of subcontractor friction on any job is an undefined boundary — a piece of work that both trades assume the other one is doing, discovered when nobody shows up to do it. Before we price a subcontract scope, we walk the interfaces with you in writing: who frames the shower niche and curb, who runs and stubs the rough plumbing, who roughs in the exhaust fan duct and electrical for vanity lighting and any heated floor circuit, who hangs and tapes drywall outside the wet area, and who handles finish carpentry like the vanity install, mirror, and trim once our tile and fixture work is done.

Our default scope is the wet-area assembly and finish: waterproofing, tile, shower pan or curbless drain system, fixture setting, and glass. We can extend into framing, drywall, and finish carpentry if that's more efficient for your crew allocation, but we price and schedule those as explicit add-ons rather than assuming they're bundled. The document we send back isn't a generic proposal — it lists the specific interfaces by trade and states which side of each line is ours.

This matters most on the two interfaces that cause the most rework industry-wide: the framing-to-waterproofing handoff (rough opening dimensions, blocking placement for grab bars or niches, and out-of-plumb walls) and the tile-to-drywall handoff (where wet-area substrate meets standard drywall, and how that transition is detailed so it doesn't crack or wick moisture). We flag both explicitly in our scope letter so your framing and drywall crews know what we need from them before we start.

We don't run our own calendar independent of yours. Once you give us a target start window, we build our internal schedule backward from your milestones and tell you what has to be true on the day before we mobilize: rough plumbing inspected and approved, rough electrical and mechanical in place, framing squared and blocked, and the space weathertight if it's part of an addition. If any of those aren't ready, we'd rather hear it a week ahead than discover it when our crew shows up with a truck.

Our own work has an internal sequence that has to be respected inside your larger schedule: waterproofing needs cure time before tile, tile and grout need cure time before fixture setting, and glass measurement can't happen until tile is set and cured. We build float into our quote for this rather than promising a compressed timeline we can't hold, and we tell you up front which of our steps are on the critical path for the rest of the house — for instance, if your finish carpenter needs the vanity top set before they can install adjacent millwork, we flag that dependency early so it's in your schedule, not discovered as a delay.

We also tell you honestly where we have flexibility. If your framing crew runs a few days behind, we can often absorb a short slip without moving our own crew's other commitments, but we need visibility into that slip as early as possible rather than a same-day cancellation. Good sequencing on a multi-trade job is mostly a communication cadence, and we'll match whatever cadence you run — daily stand-ups, weekly schedule updates, or a shared project management tool — rather than asking you to adapt to ours.

On most subcontract arrangements, you hold the permit as the general contractor of record, and we work under your permit rather than pulling a separate one. That means inspection scheduling logistics run through you, but we handle the technical side: we know what each inspector will look for at rough plumbing, waterproofing (where jurisdictions require a shower pan flood test or liner inspection), and final, and we make sure our work is ready and accessible before the inspection window you've booked.

We'll tell you in advance which of our steps require a hold point for inspection so you can build that into the schedule rather than getting a call from the inspector that work has been covered before it was seen. If a jurisdiction requires a flood test on a shower pan before it's covered by mortar bed, we schedule that test and don't proceed until it's documented, even if it costs us a day of schedule float, because an inspector who can't verify a covered assembly can require it opened back up — a delay nobody wants on either side.

If your project has its own inspector relationship or preferred scheduling process, we'll follow your lead. If you'd prefer we handle inspection scheduling directly for our portion of the scope because we know the technical requirements best, we can do that too — we just need clarity up front on which model you want, since mixing the two mid-project is where inspection scheduling tends to fall through the cracks.

Before we mobilize on any GC-led job, we send our current certificate of insurance, our contractor license information, and any additional insured endorsement you require for the project. We keep this documentation current and can turn around updated certificates quickly if your project's insurance requirements change mid-job or if a specific carrier or lender needs a particular form.

We'll also sign your standard subcontractor agreement rather than insisting on our own paperwork, provided the scope, schedule, and payment terms it references match what we quoted. If your agreement includes indemnification, safety, or site-specific compliance language, we read it carefully and flag anything that conflicts with how we actually operate rather than signing something we can't honor — that conversation is much better had before mobilization than after an incident.

For projects with specific safety documentation requirements — OSHA compliance logs, a site-specific safety plan, or subcontractor pre-qualification paperwork for a builder or developer — we complete what's asked rather than treating it as optional because we're 'just the bathroom guys.' A clean paper trail protects you as much as it protects us if a question ever comes up about who was on site and under what terms.

When we're one of several trades on an active site, we operate under your jobsite rules, not ours: your check-in procedure, your material staging areas, your dumpster and cleanup expectations, and your rules on parking, noise windows, and who's authorized to be on site. We brief our crew on your specific site rules before the first day rather than assuming a generic protocol applies.

Cleanliness matters more on a shared site than a standalone job because our dust, debris, and tile scrap can affect other trades working in adjacent rooms, and their debris can affect our tile-setting surfaces. We keep our work area broom-clean at the end of each day and protect finished work in adjacent rooms — flooring, fresh paint, cabinetry — with the same care we'd want another trade to extend to our finished tile work. If your project requires dust containment for occupied areas of the house, we set that up as part of our scope.

We also communicate proactively when our work will generate noise or require water shutoff that affects other trades or an occupied part of the house, so you can plan around it rather than fielding a surprised phone call from a homeowner or another sub mid-day.

Every RFI and change we identify goes through you, not around you and not directly to the homeowner or the architect. If we find a condition in the field that doesn't match the drawings — out-of-square framing, a plumbing rough-in in the wrong location, a structural element that conflicts with a curbless shower design — we document it with photos and a written description and route it to you for direction, along with our recommendation and any cost or schedule impact.

We price change work before we perform it, not after, so you have a number to take to the client or the owner without having to guess. If a change is time-sensitive and holding up other trades, we'll flag that urgency clearly, but we still wait for your authorization before proceeding on anything outside our original scope, because unauthorized change work is exactly the kind of thing that creates payment disputes at closeout.

This discipline goes both ways — if you or your project manager identifies something you want changed in our scope, we'll give you a straight answer on cost and schedule impact quickly rather than making you wait, since we know changes tend to cluster near the end of a project when schedule pressure is highest.

A bathroom is a layered assembly built by multiple trades, and when something fails — a leak, a cracked tile, a fixture that loosens — figuring out whose warranty covers it requires knowing exactly where each trade's work started and stopped. This is another reason the scope boundary documentation from the start of the project matters: it's the reference point for warranty allocation later, not just for pricing at the outset.

We stand behind our own workmanship on the scope we performed — waterproofing, tile installation, fixture setting, and whatever else was explicitly in our contract — for the period stated in our subcontract agreement. We don't warranty work performed by other trades even where it's adjacent to ours, such as framing we didn't do or plumbing rough-in we didn't run, and we'll say so clearly at signing rather than letting that ambiguity surface during a callback.

If a warranty issue arises and it's unclear which trade's work is implicated, we'll come look at it as part of maintaining the relationship, even if it turns out not to be our scope, and give you a straight assessment of what we think caused it. That's a better use of an hour than a dispute over whose callback it is, and it's the kind of cooperation that determines whether a GC brings us back on the next project.

We invoice against milestones tied to verifiable progress — mobilization, rough-in complete and inspected, waterproofing complete, tile and fixtures complete, final punch-list complete — rather than a single lump sum at the end, which gives you visibility into progress and gives us cash flow that matches the work performed. We're comfortable adjusting milestone structure to match your project's draw schedule or your lender's requirements if that's different from our default.

We provide conditional lien waivers with each progress invoice and an unconditional final waiver upon receipt of final payment, in whatever form your project or title company requires. If you need us to complete a specific waiver form rather than our standard one, send it early and we'll use it — this is a five-minute administrative task on our end and a real protection for you and the property owner.

On retainage, we work within standard practice for the market and will hold retainage per your subcontract terms, released at the agreed milestone — typically final inspection sign-off or a set period after substantial completion. What we ask in return is a payment schedule that doesn't string out normal progress payments the same way, since our crew and material costs are real and current even while retainage is deferred.