Every price guide gives ranges — ours included. This is the guide to the range itself: the specific, physical factors that decide whether your room lands at the bottom of it or the top. None of them are mysterious; all of them are visible to a surveyor's eye on a home visit, which is precisely why we price from your bathroom and not from a brochure.
Why Identical Rooms Price Differently
The visible bathroom — suite, panels, floor — is the minority of the job. The majority is what connects it to the building: pipework, drainage, wiring, substrate, access. Two rooms with identical Pinterest boards can differ completely underneath, and the quote follows the underneath. That's not pricing games; it's the difference between decorating and construction.
The Ten Multipliers
- 1. Floor condition — sound boards cost nothing; rot around a leaking WC means joist and deck repairs before any finish. The single biggest swing item.
- 2. Soil stack moves — WC staying put: free. Moving beyond 1.5 m: £400–£700 in floor and pipe work (the stack rules).
- 3. Water system — a gravity system wanting a proper mixer needs a pump, or the shower choice changes (system guide).
- 4. Electrics baseline — a modern consumer unit accepts a new shower circuit gracefully; an older board may need upgrading before anything's legal (the rules).
- 5. Access — third-floor deck-access flat vs driveway semi changes labour hours on every carry, both directions (the steel bath being exhibit A).
- 6. Wall substrate — sound plaster panels over quickly; blown plaster, old chases and crumbling tiles-on-tiles need rebuilding first.
- 7. Layout changes — every fitting that moves drags pipework with it; a same-layout refit is always the efficient one.
- 8. Spec tier — the honest multiplier you choose: brassware, panels, furniture. Our packages structure this transparently (pricing).
- 9. Building type — tenement solid walls, cottage stone, New Town prefab panels (their own story) each bring known workarounds with known costs.
- 10. Making good beyond the room — hall flooring at the threshold, ceiling below in flats, boxing-in elsewhere: small lines that separate finished from nearly-finished.
The Strip-Out Reveal
Some conditions only show when the old room comes off: the floor under the bath, the wall behind the tiles, the pipework in the boxing. Experienced surveyors predict most of it from the clues — a slow-draining WC, a spongy corner, staining patterns — which is why our visit involves more prodding than measuring.
How Fixed Pricing Handles Surprises
Two models exist. Day-rate quotes meter surprises to you as they surface — the quote was low because it excluded reality. Fixed-price firms carry surprise risk themselves: we survey hard up front, price what we find, and absorb what we missed (that's what the words fixed price cost us to say). The only extras in our model are changes you request mid-job. Which model a quote uses matters more than its bottom line — question five in the comparison guide.
Reading Your Own Room
Pre-visit self-survey: does the floor give anywhere? Where's the stack relative to your dream layout? Combi or tanks? How old is the fuse board? What floor are you on? Five answers put you inside a few hundred pounds of your own quote — and make you unbluffably informed when quotes arrive.
The Honest-Quote Test
A quote that engaged with your multipliers names them: itemised lines for the floor repair, the stack move, the circuit. A quote that's one number engaged with none of them — and the multipliers don't disappear; they invoice later. Ours arrives itemised, on the day, from the free home visit.
Related reading: How to compare quotes, Fitted bathroom cost guide, Cost of moving plumbing, Cost per square metre, examined.
Not sure which way to go in your own bathroom? Call 01236 801802 — a five-minute conversation usually settles it.