A shower re-tile is a full working week with someone in your house every day. A full bathroom with new flooring is usually two. People are surprised by that, because the tile itself goes up in a couple of days. The rest of the time is the work you do not see in the finished photos, and it is the work that decides whether the shower is still dry in ten years.
1. The five phases of every tile job
A backsplash, a shower, and a whole bathroom all run through the same sequence. The difference between them is how many days each phase takes and which components are in play. Add a toilet and vanity, and demo and finishing both grow. Add square footage, and setting tile grows in roughly a straight line. Take away the wet area, and prep shrinks. Once you know the skeleton, you can estimate almost any job.
Demo
1–2 daysOld tile, backer board, and whatever is coming out with it. Zero days on new construction where the room is already stripped and prepped.
Pulling tile off a wall or floor is fast. What takes the time is everything attached to it: a toilet and vanity that have to come out before the floor can, a tub surround that takes the drywall with it, a mud-set shower floor that has to be broken up in pieces and carried out.
Demo scales roughly with square footage. A tub surround and a 40 square foot floor is a day. Add a second bathroom, a laundry room, or a kitchen floor and it becomes two. Hauling debris is part of this phase, and on a full bathroom it can be several truckloads.
Site prep and rough-in
About 1 day, sometimes 2Fixing what demo exposed, moving anything that needs to move, and building the surface the tile goes on.
This is the phase homeowners do not see in the photos and the one that decides whether the tile lasts. For a shower it means framing the niche or bench, hanging cement board, flattening the walls, setting the pan, and putting down the waterproof membrane. For a floor it means grinding or leveling the subfloor and laying an anti-fracture membrane. Any small plumbing or electrical changes happen here too, before the walls close up.
A kitchen backsplash needs less of this, usually a few hours to patch the wall and check the outlets. It can also need more, if the old backsplash took the drywall paper with it or the counters are not level.
Waterproofing adds calendar time that is not labor. A sheet membrane needs to cure before the next layer can go on: fixing a mistake on this step later can be painful.
Setting tile
Scales with the jobThe part everyone pictures. It moves at a predictable rate that depends on square footage, tile size, layout, and how many cuts the room forces.
Rough production rates for a two-person crew: a straight-lay 12×24 floor goes down at 80 to 120 square feet a day. Shower walls run 40 to 60 square feet a day because every tile is held while the mortar grabs and every row is checked for level. A backsplash is a day regardless of size, because the cuts around outlets, windows, and the hood set the pace, not the area.
Layout changes the rate. Herringbone, chevron, and diagonal cut it by a third to half. Large-format tile needs two people on every lift and leveling clips on every joint. Mosaic sheets go up fast but take longer to grout. Our pricing guide covers each layout in detail, and the same multipliers apply to time.
Grout and finishes
1–3 daysGrout, silicone, trim, and everything that turns a tiled room back into a bathroom.
Grout is the next morning after the last tile. Then the corners and changes of plane get color-matched silicone, the edges get trim or bullnose, and the niche gets its finishing pieces. On a floor job the baseboards go back on and the paint gets touched up where they landed.
Fixtures come last: toilet reset, vanity and faucet, shower trim and door, towel bars and accessories. Then we test every drain and valve, walk the room with you, and haul the last of the debris.
A backsplash finishes in a morning. A shower is a full day. A full bathroom with floor, shower, vanity, and toilet is two to three days of finishing, and it is the phase most likely to spill into a third if a fixture is back-ordered or a door needs to be measured after the tile is up.
Cure time
2–3 days, no laborThe days after we leave when the room is done but should not be used yet.
Cement grout wants about 72 hours before a shower gets wet, and silicone wants 24. Epoxy grout is faster to cure and slower to install. Floors can take foot traffic the day after grout and furniture a couple of days later. After full bathroom remodels, you are often using your shower that same night. For jobs that only involve tile, we will tell you how long you should wait.
2. Typical schedules by job
Working days for a two-person crew, with all materials on site on day one.
| Job | Typical | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen backsplash | 1–2 working days | Day one set, day two grout and cleanup. Kitchen stays usable. |
| Tile repair or regrout | Half a day to 1 day | Plus cure time before a shower is used. |
| Fireplace surround | 1–3 working days | Large-format slabs and mitered corners are the long end. |
| Floor only, one room | 2–4 working days | Depends on square footage and how much leveling the subfloor needs. |
| Shower re-tile or tub-to-shower | 5–7 working days | One full working week. Includes demo, waterproofing, flood test, walls, pan, grout, and trim. |
| Full bathroom: floor, shower, vanity, toilet | 8–12 working days | Two weeks on the calendar. Longer if the vanity or fixtures are not on site when we start. |
| Two bathrooms back to back | 3–4 weeks | We stagger them so one is usable while the other is torn up. |
If your job is a mix, add the phases up. A backsplash and a laundry room floor in the same visit is a backsplash day plus a floor day plus one grout morning for both, so three days instead of the four they would take separately.
3. A hall bath, day by day
The same 5×8 hall bath from our pricing guide: tub out, walk-in shower in, new floor, toilet and vanity reset. Eight working days, which is a week and a half on the calendar.
Day 1
Demo
Tub, surround, floor, toilet, and vanity out. Debris hauled.
Day 2
Prep
Framing for the niche, cement board, floor leveled, membranes down.
Day 3
Finalizing prep
Shower pan set and waterproofed, and a careful pass over everything so it's perfect.
Day 4
Shower walls
First two walls set with leveling clips.
Day 5
Shower walls, floor
Third wall and niche finished. Bathroom floor set.
Day 6
Grout
Shower and floor grouted. Silicone in the corners.
Day 7
Trim and fixtures
Edge trim, baseboards, toilet and vanity set, shower trim installed.
Day 8
Finish and walkthrough
Paint touch-up, door or curtain rod, test, walkthrough.
If you only intalled a shower, we might tell you to wait three days for everything to cure. If you skip the floor and vanity: this becomes a five-day shower job. Add a second bathroom and it becomes three weeks, staggered so one is always usable.
4. What stretches a job
Most jobs land inside the ranges above. When one runs long, it is almost always one of these.
- What is behind the wall
- Rot, mold, a subfloor that was never fastened, plumbing that was capped instead of removed. We show you photos the day we find it and price the fix before we continue. This is the most common reason a week becomes a week and a half.
- Tile that is not on site
- Every schedule assumes all tile, trim, and fixtures are at the house on day one, including the extra 10 to 20% for cuts. Running short mid-job means waiting on a dye lot that may not match.
- Decisions made after demo
- Adding a niche, changing the layout, or swapping tile once the walls are open is fine, and we can accomodate change orders. Usually straightforward.
- Other trades
- If the plumbing or electrical scope is bigger than we handle ourselves, the licensed sub has their own calendar. We schedule them before we start, but a missed day on their end moves ours.
- Permits and inspections
- Most tile work needs no permit. When inspections are involved, the inspection has to happen before we close the wall, and inspectors book days out.
- Cure time
- Membranes, thinset, grout, and silicone each need their hours. We cannot compress them, and a contractor who says they can may be skipping something.
5. What keeps it on schedule
- 1
Have everything on site before day one.
Tile with waste, trim pieces, grout color, the vanity, the faucet, the shower valve trim. The single biggest thing you control.
- 2
Make the layout decisions before demo.
Niche size and height, bench or no bench, where the pattern starts. Changing these later costs days, not hours.
- 3
Clear the room and the path to it.
Everything out of the bathroom, a clear route to the door, and a spot for the debris pile. We protect floors from the front door in.
- 4
Plan for the room being out of service.
A shower job is a week without that shower. A full bathroom is two. If it is the only bathroom in the house, tell us and we will sequence the toilet to be down as few days as possible.
- 5
Expect us at 8am.
We work straight through and leave the site broom-clean each day. If a day slips, we do our best to tell you the day before.
These are typical durations for our crew. When we walk the site, we can talk you through the expected timelines.