Bathroom Remodeling in Cambridge, MA

Triple-decker street, cars parked at the curb

Two thirds of the homes in Cambridge are rented, and much of the rest is one floor of a triple-decker or half of a two-family that used to be a single house. Hardly any of it is a detached house with a driveway. Cambridge bathroom remodeling means working inside those buildings, around the people who live in the rest of them. One good thing about a city this compact is that everywhere is ten minutes from everywhere else. We’re big fans of the burgers at Mr. Bartley’s, and Toscanini’s is far and away our favorite ice cream place.

Town Highlights and Property Values

Cambridge sits directly across the Charles from Boston, and it fits about 120,000 people into six and a half square miles. Harvard and MIT are what people picture from outside. Once you live here it’s more a set of neighborhoods, each with its own shops and its own regulars. Most weeks happen within a few blocks of home, and the line out of Flour on Mass Ave on a Saturday morning is a fair illustration of that.

The north and west end of the city is where a lot of that ordinary life goes on. Huron Village has a short row of shops people actually walk to. Two-families and small wood-frame houses line the streets off Concord Ave and Huron Ave, and they’re quiet in a way visitors never really see.

Danehy Park is the big open space up there. Fifty acres of fields, paths and a dog park that half of North Cambridge seems to use. Here’s the part most people who live nearby don’t know. That land was a clay pit. The New England Brick Company mined it from 1847, turning out two thousand bricks a day at the peak, and dug down about fifty feet before the clay gave out. They stayed until 1952. The city then used the hole as its dump right through to the early seventies, and the park opened on top of it in 1990. So a fair amount of the brick in Cambridge walls came out of what is now the soccer field. Every July the Cambridge Jazz Festival sets up out there, free to walk into.

Mayor Danehy Park entrance

The new Tobin Montessori and Darby Vassall school complex opened over on Vassal Lane last fall, right beside the park. It’s a genuinely good-looking building and the neighborhood seems pleased with it.

What homes cost in Cambridge

Almost everyone who calls us here owns a condo or a floor of a two-family, so that’s the setting for most of our Cambridge bathroom remodeling. The median condo lands somewhere between $855,000 and a little over a million, and which figure you get depends on which service is counting. The average on year-to-date sales sits closer to $1.25 million. Detached single-family houses barely change hands at all. There were nineteen on the market across the whole city this spring, so that average swings too much to be worth quoting. Condos are taking about eighty days to sell now, and that’s slower going than a year ago.

Most of these buildings are a century old or more, so there’s nearly always something waiting. Bathrooms come up more than any other room, mostly because they’re small enough to have been quietly ignored for forty years. Taking on a house this old can feel like a lot. With some research behind you and the right people alongside, it moves along better than most people expect.

Design Considerations for Your Cambridge Bathroom Remodel

Design is probably where your head already is, and it should be. This is the part you’ll look at every morning for years. On a Cambridge bathroom remodeling job, it’s where the money either shows or doesn’t.

To end up with a bathroom that looks like it belongs, work out what your building actually is first. Cambridge filled in over three long stretches of building. The Federal and Greek Revival houses came first, from the 1820s through the 1850s, and the best of them sit on and around Brattle Street. Those take a restrained bathroom well, with simple moldings and marble and not much fuss. Then came the Second Empire mansards and the Queen Anne Victorians, roughly 1855 to 1890, which fill Avon Hill and much of Mid Cambridge. Their rooms have the ceiling height and the trim to carry deep color and real pattern without it looking overdone. Last came the triple-deckers, the two-families and the small brick and wood cottages of the 1890s through the 1920s. That’s most of Cambridgeport, Inman, and the streets north of Porter. Those were built to be practical, and a clean transitional bathroom suits them.

Mansard-roofed Victorian with green shutters on a leafy street

Finding your own direction for a Cambridge bathroom remodel

That said, there’s still a lot of room for your own taste. A good first move is to start a photo album on your phone. Twelve or fifteen bathrooms over a week or two is plenty. Then go back later and look for what keeps turning up. It might be a kind of tile. It might be the shape of a vanity, or a color you clearly can’t leave alone. Once you can say two or three of those things out loud you have a direction, and every decision after that gets a good deal easier.

One more thing, and it costs nothing. Your own building will show you what somebody cared about in 1890. A marble threshold, a stair rail, the trim around a door. That detail is very often the thing your Cambridge bathroom renovation should be reaching back toward.

Bathroom Remodeling in Cambridge

These buildings can be tricky to work in. Experience with this kind of building counts for far more than any fixture you end up choosing, because most of what goes wrong is already inside the walls before anybody starts.

Most of what makes Cambridge bathroom remodeling its own particular thing comes down to one fact. Nearly every building here has been divided at some point. A single-family became a two-family. A two-family became three condos. Each time around, somebody ran new pipe and new wire through whatever space happened to be available at the time. Plaster walls and knob-and-tube wiring turn up constantly, and we handle both as a matter of course. The harder part is that your bathroom shares a building with other people, and every decision about the work has to account for them.

Common issues in Cambridge two-families and condo conversions

1. Venting the fan through solid brick. Plenty of these buildings are brick the whole way through, with no cavity to run a duct inside. So the vent goes up through the roof, or out through eight inches of masonry. Both are doable, but settle it early, because it decides where the fan sits.
2. Plumbing that doesn’t match the deed. After a conversion, the pipes serving your unit often run through space that now belongs to a neighbor. We map that before demolition, not during.
3. A bathroom sitting over somebody’s kitchen. In a stacked building a leak lands on someone else’s ceiling. The waterproofing under a new shower has to be right first time, so we take that stage slowly and check it before tile goes down.
4. One shared stair, in and out. No driveway, one staircase, sometimes three flights of it. Every tub, every bag of debris and every sheet of board goes past somebody’s front door. Protecting that and timing deliveries is a real part of the job.
5. Pressure at the top of a three-family. Cambridge treats its own water and feeds the city by gravity from the Payson Park reservoir in Belmont. That’s fine nearly everywhere. On a third floor with original supply lines it can mean a shower that never quite delivers, so we measure before anyone picks fixtures.

That’s a lot to take in. It’s also an ordinary week for anybody who works in these buildings regularly. Dealing with it while the walls are open keeps it from becoming your problem three years from now. Plenty of owners redraw the room entirely at that point, and swapping a tub for a walk-in shower comes up most, especially where the bathroom was fitted into a corner of a former bedroom.

Permits for Cambridge Bathroom Remodeling

Permitting is one of the least interesting parts of a project and one of the most capable of delaying it. It’s where a schedule quietly loses three weeks, so somebody has to stay in front of the building department and keep the applications moving. On every Cambridge bathroom remodeling job we take, that somebody is us.

Massachusetts only lets contractors holding a Construction Supervisor License and a Home Improvement Contractor registration pull permits for this work. We hold both. Ours is the unrestricted CSL, the most advanced class there is. A lot of very good tradespeople can build everything a bathroom needs, but whether the finished work is permitted and signed off is a separate question entirely. Your neighbors have a stake in that answer too, because unpermitted work in one unit has a way of surfacing years later in somebody else’s title search. It’s fair to ask to see licenses before you sign anything, including ours.

Will a conservation district hold up your Cambridge bathroom renovation?

This is the thing we get asked about most often here, and the answer is almost always no. There are two local historic districts, Old Cambridge and Fort Washington, and four neighborhood conservation districts on top of them, covering Avon Hill, Half Crown-Marsh, Harvard Square and Mid Cambridge. Between them they take in a lot of the oldest housing in the city. What the Historical Commission reviews is the exterior. Specifically the part somebody can see from a public way. It has no mandate over interiors at all. Interior work gets signed off by staff as a Certificate of Non-Applicability, usually inside a few days, and it never reaches a hearing. The exceptions are worth knowing. A new window changes the outside of the building, and so does a fan duct that surfaces where the street can see it. Both are worth raising early, and then they stop being a problem.

Cambridge Street Logistics: Debris Removal and Parking

Resident permit, street cleaning and snow emergency tow signs outside wood-frame cottages

Debris is the part nobody thinks about until it’s sitting on the sidewalk. There’s no driveway on most of these streets. So a dumpster means renting curb space from the city, and that takes a week’s notice.

1. Street occupancy application: $100
2. First week of curb space: $100
3. Each additional week: $125
4. Metered space fees: $156 per week

Street cleaning runs April through December, once a month on each side of the street. The city stopped towing back in April and raised the ticket to $100 instead. We get the staging on a Cambridge bathroom remodeling job worked out well before the first day on site. The rules shift the moment you cross a city line, so Somerville and Arlington each get handled a little differently.

The Cove Bath Approach

That’s a lot of detail, and we’ve put it all in front of you at once. A bathroom project has more moving parts than most people expect walking into it, and seeing them all listed in a row can make the whole thing look worse than it really is. Having the right team beside you takes most of that weight off.

Our clients are busy people, and nearly all of them are fitting this around a job and a family. So we take the coordinating on ourselves. Your part should be making the calls that genuinely matter to you. Ours is everything else, subcontractors and inspection schedule included. Design is also where we think a project earns most of its money back, and that goes double in a small condo bathroom where nobody is adding square footage. Good decisions about layout and light end up doing the work that extra space would have done. How far into that you want to sit is up to you.

A full Cambridge bathroom remodeling project usually lands between $25,000 and $40,000. You have that figure in writing before the first wall comes down. In a stacked property the promise is worth more than it would be elsewhere, because one nasty surprise behind the plaster can drag two other households into your project. If you want to talk a project through, we’d be glad to hear from you. Questions about how any of this works are welcome too. Reach us at info@covebath.com or book a consultation. Our other service areas are worth a look as well if you have family nearby.