Apartment renovation order of works: from demolition to finish, and why waterproofing comes before tiling

The first stage is to strip out what's being replaced and expose what's being worked on. You take up the old floor, remove fixtures and cabinets, break out walls that are meant to move, and sometimes strip plaster back to the block to see the real state of the wall behind the old finish. Without this stage you work blind, and old problems stay hidden under the new work.

Demolition is also a discovery stage. This is where you find old pipework that leaks, damp that was hiding behind a cabinet, non-compliant wiring, or a structure different from what was assumed. Better to find all of that now, when the wall is open and cheap to fix, than after it's been tiled and painted over. So we go over the exposed condition before continuing, and update the BOQ if the site turns out different from the assumption.

It also matters to separate what comes out from what stays. Not every wall is broken, and not every pipe is replaced. In a shared building there are load-bearing walls you can't touch and building-wide service lines that run through the wet rooms, and those stay where they are. We mark up front what comes down and what stays, so the demolition is focused and not destructive beyond what's needed, and so we don't accidentally open up something that's hard and costly to put back.

Once the site is clear you build what stays hidden for good. If walls are moving or partitions are going up, that happens now, before any services, because the position of the wall decides where the pipes and wiring will run. Only when the spaces are at their final size can the points be planned correctly.

Then the plumber and electrician come in. They cut chases into the wall, run water and waste pipes, pull power and data lines, and set every end point: taps, drains, sockets, switches and light points. Anything that goes into the wall or floor at this stage gets closed up later under plaster and tile, so this is the stage to decide finally where everything sits.

This is also where the floor screed goes down, the levelling layer that the waterproofing and tiling come over later. The screed is what sets the falls in the wet rooms, the direction water will run toward the drain. A fall set correctly at the screed stage is the foundation for everything that follows.

Before the wet rooms are covered with finish, they're waterproofed. In a bathroom, a shower, and sometimes a kitchen and balcony too, you form a continuous sealed envelope over the floor and over the wall in the wet zone, including the corners, the junctions and the penetrations like the drain and pipe crossings. That envelope is the home's real protection against water, and it sits under the tile, not in the tile itself.

Waterproofing is the point of no return in a renovation. The moment you tile over it, it's closed, and you can't inspect or repair it without taking up the tiling. So at this stage we work to one coherent waterproofing system, applied per the manufacturer's instructions and the Israeli standard for wet-room waterproofing, and we don't rush on before the waterproofing has properly dried.

This stage is the core of the work for us, not an add-on to it. We work with double waterproofing, and we run a documented flood test before tiling: we fill the wet area with water and confirm there's no drop in the level and no damp underneath or in the adjoining walls. Only after the test passes do we move on to tiling. The seven common waterproofing failures, and how each is avoided, we covered in a separate guide linked below.

This is the one worth understanding, because it's where the most renovations fall down. The tile and grout are not the waterproofing layer. A ceramic tile doesn't pass water, but the grout joints between tiles do, and the adhesive under them absorbs water. The water that passes through the joints reaches the surface under the tile, and that surface is the one that has to be sealed. If there's no waterproofing there, the water carries on into the concrete, into the adjoining wall and into the flat below.

From that comes the build order. The waterproofing has to be one continuous layer under the tile, running across the floor, up the wall in the wet zone, and wrapping the drain and pipe penetrations. You can't form a continuous envelope like that after tiling, because the tiling covers the exact surface that needs sealing. So the waterproofing comes first, is checked by a flood test, and only then is the tile laid over it as a finish and protection layer.

When it's done backward, tiled first and then waterproofed over the tile or in the joints alone, you get a surface seal that holds until the first grout joint cracks. Then the water goes under the tile to a surface that was never prepared for it, and spreads sideways with nothing showing on the surface. By the time the stain appears on the neighbor's ceiling, it's already far from the entry point, and the repair means taking up a whole floor to reach a waterproofing layer that was never there.

Only after the waterproofing is checked and passes do you start tiling and cladding the walls. At this stage everything beneath is already closed and tested, and the tiler works on a prepared surface: a correct fall, continuous waterproofing, and treated penetrations. So the tile sits on a stable base, and the grout stays a finish line, not a last line of defense.

The order of works continues within the tiling too. You usually tile the floor and walls before fitting the sanitary ware, cabinets and shower glass, because the fixtures connect to a finished surface. The rule here is the same: each element comes in after the surface it connects to is ready, not before.

Last comes the visible finish: filler and paint on the walls, fitting doors, joinery and cabinets, the final connection of sanitary ware and taps, and installing light fittings, sockets and switches. These are the stages most sensitive to handling, so they come last in the queue, after the 'dirty' work of demolition, chasing and tiling is behind us.

There's an order within the finish too. You usually paint before the final fit-out so you don't mark new fixtures and joinery, and you leave the last electrical and water connections to the end so they aren't damaged during the work. When the sequence is kept from demolition to this point, the final stage really is just finishing, not repairing something that was closed too early.

This is also where the loop closes with the client. We go over the finished flat against the BOQ, confirm every item was done as agreed, and hand over the written warranty on wet work. A fixed crew that ran the whole chain is what lets us stand behind every stage, not just behind the final signature.