We need help in what to do with getting started on a bathroom remodel that is the first room of a whole-house, room-by-room remodel that is planned for the next few years. I apologize for the length of this post; brevity is clearly not one of my stronger suits!

Several months ago, we purchased a home that was built in 1949, and has had very little done to it since then. Everything in the house is solid and functional, just very, very dated. We have spent the time since purchasing the house planning out the order of renovations in the house. We are going to pay for the remodel out of pocket (no loans) and expect that it will take in the neighborhood of five years to fully complete.

The first room in the house that will be remodeled is the upstairs bathroom. It is about 55 square feet. While all of the fixtures, wall, ceiling, and flooring surfaces, and the window on the exterior wall will be replaced, the dimensions of the bathroom and location of the major fixtures will not be changing. It is essentially a gut and replace.

We wanted to take our time with the planning as many of the details that will go into the bathroom will be used throughout the entire house as it is remodeled. We want the tile on the floor to be used in the other 1.5 bathrooms, the new window trim used on all of the other windows in the house as they are replaced, etc. We invested a lot of time into the planning process and have created a request for quote document for the bathroom that is 23 pages long.

Our hope was that by being detailed and thorough, we would help communicate to whichever contractor is chosen, what we are looking for and want to achieve. We are in Michigan and understand that the summer is a very busy time in the north for contractors. We are open to having the work being done during the winter (including the window replacement) to help with scheduling. Our priority is quality first. We want this to be our last remodel (we are both approaching retirement in the next ten years).

Two reputable contractors that we met with will not bid on the bathroom remodel after seeing the request for quote document. Both contractors are experienced in bathroom and other kinds of remodels and are very highly recommended to us from multiple sources (some of which are friends where we can see the work that was completed without receiving that information as a reference from the contractor).

The discussions with the two contractors went well on-site, at the house. Both indicated that they were interested in bidding on the work. We gave them each a copy of the request for quote document. It was when following-up with each to determine if there were any questions we could answer, that we were informed by each that they did not want to bid.

One contractor said he did not think he was the right person for the job but could not recommend anyone else for us to talk with (we took that as a warning sign that he thought we were going to be difficult to work with). The other contractor did volunteer that he felt he could not respond to the request for quote because of how specific it was (again, a warning sign of a possible pain-in-the-neck client). Neither contractor wants to pursue additional discussions with us on how to address what their concerns are or provide a quote.

It is clear to us that the request for quote document is a problem, not the asset we were hoping it would be. One of the reasons we were so detailed was that we have hoped that with a good experience on the first bathroom remodel, we could continue to use the same contractor throughout the rest of the house.

We are not going to talk with any additional contractors until we can determine how to move forward without risking alienating them. We live in a relatively small town and the number of well-regarded contractors in our area is somewhat limited. We can't afford to have all of them unwilling to work with us.

If it would be helpful, I can remove the personally identifying information from the request for quote and attempt to post it here in PDF format. (I'm not sure if we can post PDF documents here or not, but I can try to give it a go.)

Do we completely toss-out the request for quote document? What suggestions or recommendations do either contractors out there or home owners who have used a request for quote document have for us? I am guessing that what we have done is out of the normal realm what is seen when asking for quotes on a remodel job?