Bathroom remodeling in Louisiana starts at a soft floor, a stack that has sweated for years, and a fan that never actually leaves the attic. A bath on joists over a wet crawl and a bath on a slab in Baton Rouge do not hide the leak in the same place. Describe the structure under the pan before the finish.
Raised houses drop every overflow and every failed gasket into open wood. The joists darken, the lattice smells, and the floor still feels only slightly soft at the tub. Cast iron and old lead at the drain hide the drip. Slab baths send the same water sideways under the pan until a hall tile loosens or a closet smells sweet. Hollow sound on the tile means the pan is done. Grout is not a repair.
Humidity keeps the room from drying even when the plumbing is honest, so fans matter as much as drains. A fan that dumps above the ceiling soaks the deck and frames a fake roof leak. Small baths added along a shotgun hall or a back porch have almost no duct path, and the mirror stays fogged. A vanity on an exterior wall feeds rot into the sill. Termites find that wet wood faster in the southern parishes than a surface treatment will admit.
If the stack is cast iron, opening the chase is part of the work. A pretty surround on a rotten subfloor or on a slab pan that is already broken will fail in the next wet season. Clay movement under some slabs cracks tile in a line and racks the door. Say whether other doors in the house stick. Say whether the crawl under the tub is already stained. That is the remodel. The fixture color is not.
Call with the town and the floor under the bath. Pier house, slab, or a raised villa with the bath over a board ceiling you can see. Say what is soft, what smells, and whether the fan grille is black. Mention if wind-driven rain has also wet the outside wall of that room, because the leak may not be the pipe. The trade needs the wet wood or the wet slab first. Call the number on this page.