The beauty of real marble...

Solberg Builders does all kinds of tile, but it’s fairly rare that a client asks us to install marble or natural stone in a bathroom. Pebble/River rock shower floors are a common request, but natural stone tile showers have become less popular these days…because it’s a little more expensive and a LOT more care & maintenance. This project consists of two distinct bathroom remods in two completely different aesthetic styles. The master bath’s floors & shower are a stately Turkish marble with clean rectified edges and a perfect layout (if I can toot my own horn for a second.) The other bath is smooth italian grey porcelain in a stacked grid. More photos to come shortly.

Taste, style, & warm toes

Here is another example of the bathroom footprint that we’ve remodeled so many times it’s second nature at this point. These clients are art historians & collectors, so style was a priority.

Bathseat Bingo: a gorgeous mid-century shower

Gotta brag a little bit about this one. Originally this was a tiny half bath. We busted out a wall, extended the floorplan and created a hallway closet in the process. We created a sexy doorless white subway shower with niche and corner seat, Delta’s proprietary “Champagne Bronze” hardware (which was a challenge to match), penny tile floors, floating vanity from a slab of solid sapele with italian vessel sink, and handmade sapele towel hooks. Plus a Velux sun tube over the shower! This bath will razz your berries.

Two quick shower upgrades

Here we tore out fiberglass shower inserts and built new tile showers from scratch. This is an example of our ability to integrate a new shower into an existing bathroom.

Two Baths and a Kitchen...

A wonderful retired couple in the Weaverville area who live in a homogenous development hired Solberg Builders to upgrade their kitchen & baths. They wanted unique and elegant showers with beautiful tile work, new vanities, new fixtures, custom tops, and many little improvements throughout. We planned this project before COVID-19 shook up the whole world. My clients were in a high-risk group, so they were concerned with moving forward - I was too! We evolved a process where we had minimum interaction, plastic barriers, and disinfecting surfaces at the end of each workday. The result was a safe environment for everyone, beautiful transformations, and a completed project (3 projects, really) within the prescribed budget and timeframe.

Cats Deserve the Very Best...

My partner, who works in non-profit animal sheltering, asked me whether there are any custom catio builders in Asheville (Catio = patio + cat.) She told me that most cats really want to be outside and need regular exposure to the sun & fresh air, but responsible cat owners know that letting their feline family members roam free out of doors can be bad for the local ecosystem and worse, bad for the kitty’s health. Kittyfriends can get parasites, fight with other cats, or hit by cars - it’s a big scary world for a little buddy. So after discussing it, I realized that in addition to residential remodel for human clients, a good side hustle would be building custom screen room/sun porches for feline clients.

Another Bath Transformed

This one is very similar to last year’s “From Boring to Bold” blog entry. The job was to create a more functional and luxurious space in a master bathroom, which had seen better days. The floorplan, adjacent to the master bedroom, was precisely the same as many bathrooms we’ve done and with so much space to work in, it was a breeze to create exactly what the client wanted. We covered everything with plastic so there was no need for the client to move much out of the way.

First we demolished the poorly installed corner shower stall with failing grout and shower pan. We tore the whole bathroom out and made the debris disappear, without dirtying the tidy home. (All useful components went to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore.) We framed the new shower enclosure and closet and installed high quality shower substrata, but before we could move forward we needed to solve the problem of the wallpaper. Anyone who has tried to remove wallpaper knows that if it wasn’t properly applied, removing it is a lost cause. You may as well tear the drywall out and start over. We found a technique to resurface the wallpaper that saved the clients thousands of dollars and resulted in a perfectly smooth, good-as-new wall. Then we were able to do our typical top-quality tile installation over radiant floor heat, beautiful trim carpentry, fixtures and cabinetry. The results speak for themselves. Project duration: 5 weeks.

Huge Curbless Shower & Bath Remod

Clients for whom we’ve worked enough times that I’ve lost count, hired us to do this amazing bathroom remodel. They have an extremely beautiful Acorn Deck Home (mid-century modern architecture meets the pop sensibilities of the sixties & seventies) and although the structural lines and resulting spaces in this home are gorgeous, the finishes left something to be desired. This is exactly why the owners repeatedly hire Solberg Builders to make each room as beautiful as the overall home design.

We started with a full gut of the 200 SF room and luckily we were able to send all the debris over a patio railing and into the truck container. Within a couple days we were laying out the new framing to realize the client’s own design. First we removed a central partition to create more space for vanities and better utilize the shower space. We added a Velux sun tube into the walk-in closet, redesigned a smaller closet to become a vertical shoe organizer, replaced one operable casement window with privacy glass and added a second in the lavatory. We adjusted the plubming locations, dropped the subfloor by and inch or two, installed new tile substrate everywhere, and installed two colors of beautiful new porcelain tile (large format on the walls & floors, and small format modules on the shower floor) on a perfectly square grid. We also installed glass tile modules on the vanity wall where custom mirrors floated in front of the tile backsplash all of which was beautifully illuminated by a design-built minimal LED light box above the vanity, seamlessly integrated with the wood ceiling and beams. Electrical work included new convenience outlets, new heated towel bar, and a sconce for the new makeup table. This redesign of the whole space made room for not only the new makeup table, but a full-height linen cabinet too.