CASE STUDY · EPHRATA, PA · 2.5 WEEKS
Daylight in a Windowless Bath: A Hall Bathroom Remodel in Ephrata
JOB CARD
Hall bathrooms are the workhorses of family life: they process the school rush, the guests and the muddy dog, all in five by eight feet. This Ephrata hall bath had one glorious asset going for it, a skylight, and one problem undermining everything else, which was the entire rest of the room.
The remodel brief was simple: keep the daylight, fix everything under it, and find storage in a footprint that has none to spare. Small bathroom remodeling is a game of inches and priorities, and this project shows how we play it.
Small room, strict priorities
In a hall bath the budget goes to surfaces and storage, in that order. We ran white tile high on the wet walls to bounce the skylight's daylight around the room, chose a vanity with actual drawers instead of the ancient under sink cave of forgotten bottles, and used a recessed medicine cabinet to steal storage from the wall cavity instead of the room.
The skylight well itself got rebuilt drywall with crisp corners and semi gloss paint. A skylight well in a bathroom lives a hard humid life, and it is usually the first place cheap paint tells on itself.
Humidity is the hidden client
A windowless bath lives or dies by its exhaust fan, skylight or not. We sized the new fan to the room with headroom to spare, ducted it to the exterior with smooth rigid duct, and put it on a timer. ENERGY STAR's ventilation fan guidance is a solid reference for sizing, and the certified fans are dramatically quieter, which matters because loud fans get turned off, and fans that are off grow mildew.
We also found the old fan had been venting into the attic for years, which is how attics grow their own weather. It now vents outside like it always should have. If your bathroom fan just goes up, that is worth checking this week, not during a remodel.
The numbers for a hall bath
This project sat in the heart of our published hall bathroom range of $12,000 to $22,000, detailed in the bathroom cost guide. Ephrata is ten minutes from our shop, so if your own workhorse bathroom is overdue, the estimate is easy to schedule and free either way.
SHOT ON SITE BY OUR CREW. NO STOCK, NO STAGING.