There is a difference between swapping a suite and genuinely reconfiguring a room. A full refit means lifting the floor, and behind most old bathrooms we find rotten floorboards, failed or missing tanking, a previous owner's bodged pipework, and lead or old copper that needs replacing before anything new goes in.
A wet room lives or dies on the tanking underneath the tiles. We take the floor down, build the falls to the drain, and tank the whole wet area properly before a single tile goes on, because a wet room fitted quickly is the one that leaks into the room below.
A bathroom is small enough to stand in the middle of and touch every wall, and every trade still has to pass through it in turn. Plumber, electrician, plasterer, tiler, all working in the same few square metres, and the order they go in decides how the job runs. Get the sequencing wrong and a two week bathroom turns into a six week bathroom, with the family using next door's shower while the delay quietly adds up in the background. Running that order properly, first fix before boarding, boarding before tanking, tanking before tiling, is most of the job. It matters more than the fittings you eventually choose, and it is where a badly run bathroom starts to drag on.
An en suite or cloakroom rarely gets a room built for it. It usually comes out of a box room, the end of a landing, or a corner taken from the main bedroom, which means the soil pipe run and the door swing decide the layout before the fittings do, and the ceiling height often decides whether it can take a shower at all.
A bathroom in a loft conversion or an older property comes with its own problems: sloping ceilings that dictate where the shower can actually go, water that has to be pumped rather than gravity fed, and joists that were never sized with a bath in mind. We check all of it, and where the property sits for planning purposes, before we start pricing the work, not after the tiles are already up.
A strip out takes the room back to the floorboards and the brick, so we can see what is really there: the state of the joists, whether the old tanking failed, what the existing pipework is made of, and whether the soil pipe needs moving at all. Underfloor heating, new extraction and full rewiring of the bathroom circuit can all go in at this stage, while the floor is up and the walls are open, rather than being squeezed in later.
Moving the toilet means moving the soil pipe, and that decision drives the cost and the programme more than any tile or tap.
Tanking failure is the single most common bathroom disaster we get called to, usually surfacing years later.
Old houses bring their own problems: uneven floors, solid walls that resist chasing, and old pipework that needs boxing in, not ripping out.
We start by looking at what is actually there rather than guessing from a couple of photos. Our team comes out, lifts a board if needed, checks the joists, the existing pipework and whether the soil pipe can realistically stay where it is. A loft conversion bathroom needs a different conversation to a Victorian terrace bathroom with solid walls, and an older property needs its own conversation again, since work like this can throw up issues you simply would not get in a newer build. Once we know what we are actually dealing with, we agree the scope and the order of work with you before anything gets lifted.
Electrics in a bathroom follow strict zones around the bath and shower, and must be signed off by someone qualified.
Tiling only lasts if the substrate is flat, sound and waterproofed properly.
Extraction has to meet building regulations for ventilation, especially with no window or in a loft conversion.
We cover Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire from our base in Bury St Edmunds, fitting bathrooms in towns such as Thetford, Newmarket and Stowmarket, as well as on Victorian terraces, 1930s semis and newer estate housing alike. It is the same team from the first visit through to snagging, so the people who looked at your bathroom are the people running it day to day, not a different subcontractor turning up once the deposit is banked. Get in touch with what you are dealing with, uneven floor, solid walls, only one bathroom in the house, and we will talk you through what it actually involves before you commit to anything.
