Cast iron drains in houses built before 1965
Most Fort Worth houses built before 1965 drain through cast iron. That pipe is past sixty years old now, and it fails from the inside: the pipe wall scales up, the bottom thins, and one day a section cracks or a joint leaks. It's at the end of its life whether you remodel or not.
When we open a bathroom in a Ridglea Hills or Mistletoe Heights house from that era, we expect to find some of it. Either way, the cheapest time to replace it is while the floor is already open.
Galvanized supply lines in houses built before 1970
If your house was plumbed before 1970, the water supply lines are probably galvanized steel. They rust from the inside, so the opening narrows year by year. The shower that never quite has pressure and the tub that runs faintly brown after a vacation are the symptoms.
A bath remodel opens the walls those lines run through. Replacing them with PEX or copper while the wall is open costs far less than opening a finished wall to do it later. It's worth doing whenever galvanized pipe turns up, and we price it in the plan so you can decide with the number in front of you rather than in the middle of construction.
We'd rather find the cast iron on day one than on the day the tile setter shows up.
Slab plumbing, and what moving a fixture means
Most Fort Worth houses from the 1950s on sit on a concrete slab, and the drains run through it. A toilet that stays where it is needs a new flange. A toilet that moves four feet needs a saw cut through the slab, new pipe trenched and set, an inspection, and concrete poured back before the floor can go down.
Moving plumbing on a slab is meaningful work: usually $3,000 to $10,000 per fixture moved, depending on access and pipe routing. That's the single biggest lever in an older-house bath. A layout that keeps the fixtures in place and replaces what you see costs less and finishes faster than one that moves the shower across the room.
Ventilation, and why it isn't optional
Old bathrooms often have a fan that hums and moves little air, or a window that nobody opens in August. Moisture that doesn't leave the room lands on the framing behind the tile and stays there. That's how a fifty-year-old bath ends up with rotted studs and mold behind the tile.
We size the fan to the room and run the duct to the outside through the roof or a wall cap. Not into the attic, where it condenses on the underside of the roof deck. A quiet, properly ducted fan is a small line item, and it protects everything else you're about to pay for.
Historic-district review, where it applies
A bathroom remodel is interior work, and Fort Worth's historic review looks at what shows from the street. In most cases the review never enters the picture. It does when the remodel adds or moves a window, changes a street-facing wall, or runs a new vent or flue through an elevation the district protects.
Which rules apply depends on your address. Fort Worth has several historic overlay districts, some streets and individual houses carry their own designation, and parts of a neighborhood can be covered while the rest is not. We check the map during pre-construction so a window swap doesn't stall your permit.
The assessment before demo
We do a plumbing assessment as part of pre-construction. The goal is to move surprises from the demo week onto the plan.
We try to identify everything before construction starts, and some discoveries still only happen after demolition. When one does, you see the cost at cost with our markup named, the same way you see everything else.
Where to go next on this site: Bathroom Refresh · Bathroom remodeling in Fort Worth · How long a bathroom remodel takes