A bathroom renovation is one of the higher-impact home improvements possible, and one of the most stressful if it is planned badly. The room is small, every trade has to work in it in the right order, and if any of the sequencing goes wrong the whole schedule slips. Most of the horror stories about bathroom projects come down to poor planning at the start rather than poor work in the middle. A little more time spent before anyone lifts a floor tile is worth several days at the back end.
Start with an honest look at what the room actually needs. A full renovation – stripping to the studs, moving pipework, replacing everything – takes two to three weeks and is priced accordingly. A refresh, keeping the layout and swapping out the suite, tiles and taps, takes a week to ten days and costs a fraction as much. Many households ask for a full renovation when a refresh would give them what they actually wanted. If the current layout works, if the pipework is in the right place, and if the room is dry, a refresh is usually the better spend.
Layout is the one decision you cannot easily undo once the plumbing goes in, so it is worth spending real time on. Draw the room to scale on graph paper, cut out to-scale rectangles for the bath, basin, toilet and shower, and try different arrangements. Two rules apply. First, do not put a shower or bath on a wall shared with a bedroom if you can avoid it, because the noise carries. Second, keep the drainage runs short – the further the toilet or basin is from the existing soil stack, the more expensive the pipework becomes and the more likely it is to run into problems.
Choosing the suite is where taste takes over. In small Bournemouth bathrooms, wall-hung units are worth the extra cost because they visually clear the floor and make the room feel larger. In larger family bathrooms, a freestanding bath is a genuinely nice thing to live with but eats floor space and needs a solid floor beneath. If a shower is going in, the choice between an over-bath shower and a separate shower enclosure depends on how the room is actually used – families with young children keep the bath, but everyone else usually prefers a dedicated shower.
Tiles need thinking about not just in terms of appearance but in terms of practicality. Large format tiles look elegant but are harder to install well and less forgiving of a wall that is out of true. Small mosaic tiles have too many grout lines and are a nightmare to clean; the compromise is medium-sized tiles, 300 x 600 or thereabouts, laid horizontally to widen the room visually. Whatever you choose, buy ten to fifteen per cent extra for cuts and replacements.
Extraction is the one thing most homeowners underspecify. A weak fan means a bathroom that stays humid for hours after every shower, and that in turn means mould in the grout, peeling paint on the ceiling and eventually damage to the plaster behind. The fan should be sized for the room and vented directly to outside, not into a loft space. Humidity-sensing fans that run on until the moisture level drops are worth the small extra cost.
Sequencing the trades is where a good bathroom fitter in Bournemouth earns their money. The right order is roughly: strip out, first-fix plumbing and electrics, plasterboard and skimming, Tiling and finishing, second-fix plumbing and electrics, then the suite, then the finishing. Skipping any step or running them in parallel almost always causes problems – tiles laid before the plumbing is properly first-fixed have to be cut open, plaster laid over pipework that has not been pressure-tested traps future leaks. Trust a fitter who wants to do it in the right order over one who promises to do it in half the time.