Tile Installation & Remodeling in Middletown, Connecticut

Three different buildings, three different tile jobs

Middletown does not have one housing stock. It has three, and they sit within a few miles of each other, which is why a tile quote here cannot be a price per square foot off a list.

The first is the older housing around the Wesleyan blocks and the streets that run down toward the river. Median year built in Middletown is 1972, but 23% of the housing here was built in 1939 or earlier. In those houses the walls behind the tile are frequently plaster over lath rather than drywall, the joists are older and closer together, and the pipes are older than the copper you would buy today. We open a section before we price, because a substrate we did not look at is a substrate we cannot cost.

The second is the post-war stock: the 1970s and 80s ranches and capes, which together are about a third of the town's housing. These are the houses where the tub surround is original, the floor is vinyl over a slab or over particleboard, and the job is usually a tub-to-shower conversion with a new pan and new waterproofing. This is the most common request we get in Middletown, and it is the one where the waterproofing detail decides whether the shower is still good in ten years.

The third is the multifamily stock. 34% of Middletown's housing is in buildings with five or more units, and 16% is in buildings with two to four. That share is high, and it changes how a job gets quoted. A landlord or a condo association is not buying one bathroom, they are buying a building's worth of them over a decade, and the questions are different: can the work be sequenced unit by unit, can the unit be made usable at the end of every working day, and does the same detail get used every time so the second unit costs less than the first.

What the housing numbers actually tell us

Middletown has about 21,600 housing units and 45% of them are single-family detached homes. Owner-occupied is 53%, which means just under half the housing here is rented or held by an investor of some kind. In a town like that, a good share of the tile work is not a homeowner improving a house. It is a landlord keeping a unit to a standard, and it is judged on a different question: does it still look right when the next tenant moves in.

That is why we price multifamily work by the detail and not by the square foot, and why we ask which units are in the rotation before we commit to a schedule. It is also why we do not use a different standard of waterproofing on a rental than we do in a house we will never see again. The pan is the pan.

The 38% of Middletown housing built in 1980 or later is mostly 1990s and newer construction, and the 36% built in the middle of the century is the ranch-and-capecountry that dominates the middle of the map. Between them they set the pace of our work here: 1970s tub surrounds coming to the end of their service life, and kitchen floors that were laid over subfloor that has since moved.

Permits in Middletown, specifically

Middletown publishes its own list of work that is exempt from a permit, and its building department reviews applications on its own schedule. The office is the City of Middletown Building Division at 245 deKoven Drive, and it is open 8:30 to 4:30. Applications are not reviewed until payment and paperwork are in, so if a job does need a permit, it needs to go in earlier than the work does.

For finish tile work, the short answer is usually that no permit is needed. Tiling, countertops and similar finish work are on the state list of work that does not require a building permit, as long as nothing structural changes. If the job involves new plumbing, a new drain, a moved valve, or new electrical, that is permitted work, and a licensed plumber or electrician pulls it. We are a home improvement contractor registered with the state under HIC #0706534, which is a registration and not a trade licence, so we do not pull plumbing or electrical permits and could not.

We would rather you ask Middletown's own office than take our word for it. Bring a short description of the work and ask whether it is on the city's exempt list.