Can't make my mind up on Bathroom - DIY or professionals?

Phirefly

andrew-b wrote: »

I think you'll be quite hard pushed to do it for £1500 all in even if you do most of the work yourself.
I've not budgeted it out in full yet but for our small bathroom i'm looking at over £1000 just for toilet, basin, shower tray and enclosure, gravity-fed mixer shower and taps. We aren't going for the cheap stuff ..nor the really expensive - just a balance between the two so that hopefully it lasts for a good few years to come.

Same here pretty much...

andrew-b wrote: »

Similar to you PhireFly we rented before and been in this house 2 years.
So far we've spent £9,268.64p (the pence is important!!) most of which was on the kitchen which was about £6750 - though i reckon if we'd not made the big mistake of using Wickes kitchen fitters we could have done it for £5k at most)

Some spooky coincidences there! I'm considering one of Wickes new range of kitchens, how big is yours roughly? Does that price include appliances?

belfastgirl23

To be honest I think it's a bit dodgy doing DIY in the bathroom unless you really know what you're doing. If plumbing work goes wrong it can cost you a fortune to fix! And tile work that doesn't look properly done is very offputting if you're buying. I do really admire you for trying to do as much as possible yourself but on this one if you're concerned about resale value I'd go pro personally...

wallbash

wots dodgy about plumbing

The diy market in plumbing must be the best/easiest , new plastic push fittings/ or simple compession fittings. Go to a 'shed' everything you need is displayed in plastic bags, no asking 'stupied' questions to a know it behind a counter:rolleyes: Sizes are standard, so keep it simple.

Biggest disastor ..... it leeks a bit, so tighten that joint!


Just finished my down stairs cloaks, came in at £900 all in.

Phirefly

Thanks for that, Andy.

Your house looks a very similar age and layout to mine, the boiler/sink/units/sockets/windows in the first pic are precisely the same positions. And the door fronts are the same too. Are we leading parallel lives here?!

Only difference is, assuming from the size of your kitchen, you have a lobby/hallway from the front door between the kitchen and stairs to your back living room? This has been left out of our house so the kitchen is the width of the house less the staircase. This means we can fit in a small table and 4 chairs, but we'd probably have a similar number of cabinets and worktop space to you

Intersting that you've fitted in a dishwasher, I keep banging on to Mr. P that we should try and shoehorn one in somehow, but he's not so bothered (guess who's cheif bottlewasher in our house).

Looking forward to comparing bathroom pics with you!

(Sorry for hijacking your thread OP)

Phirefly

Ah sorry yes I see now, you opted for a tumble drier. I can live without one as I use my dehumidifier.

Bungalow, eh? sky's the limit (literally) on your home improvements then?! we can't extend ours in any way but we've got mooring rights in the garden so Mr. P reckons that if we ever got to the point we needed more room but couldn't move house, we'd get a little boat. Keep the kids out there.

helping_hubby

Thanks everyone. I don't mind you going off topic. I love all talk about DIY and doing up homes I'm obsessed at the moment.

I'm far from creative (programmer by trade, so colours and design - I have no clue) I'm still struggling to pick a shade of white for my 2nd bedroom. Hubby chose magnolia for the smallest which we've now painted, but I wanted to be a bit more adventurous, but the budget restricts us in needed to have to keep our existing soft furnishings and colour schemes. So I was going for neutral wall colours so I could change the furnishings later when we've saved up more.

I am inspired to go for tiles I want now, rather than tiles that are cheaper. I worked out the square metres yesterday. I need 18m2 for the walls and nearly 5 for the floor. I'm hoping it might be a little less, as you don't tile behind the bath. I believe some of our favourite tiles were £23 per sq metre. So that would be £529. If we went with the bathstore, we get 15% off the the tile shop that was downstairs. So even more savings.

I can't make my mind up about the bathstore. Its had some poor reviews, but lots of places and things I love get bad reviews. My parents have a bathstore bathroom and its lovely and still looks like it did the day they got it and that was 4 years ago.

Your kitchen is such an improvement Andrew. I see you blocked in the pipe work to the boiler (I'm a bit obsessed by boilers right now as we had one fitted last week and I'm looking at ways of hiding it).

Right off to work.

Phirefly

helping_hubby wrote: »

I can't make my mind up about the bathstore.

I have no experience of them, but I thought it was overpriced (but not as overpriced as other retailers) and I could do better elsewhere. I have bought individual components of my suite from ebay. You mentioned you'd had it priced up at £1300, as I mentioned, my suite plus taps + shower is coming to about £800, and thats for a suite that would cost £1470 off the peg.

Have confidence and give ebay a whirl, I basically found a suite I liked in b&q and have sourced the individual parts for a fraction of the cost. For example, our toilet is £390 in b&q, but I got the identical toilet, brand new, still in its box for £155.

andyhop

i have had many a customer buy sanitryware from ebay thinking there where saving money

if you buy branded you should have no problems, the amount of times ive had wcs with oval connections or sinks thats are too thin the tightening of the wastes cause the ceramic to crack,then theres the deformed items

most ebay items may be fine but the amount of troubles ive had with the likes of ceramica and plumbworld, to be fair there have instantly sent out another wc but its pointless when the cast is at fault

if your doing diy your fine your time is free but if you have a plumber fitting your suite you will be charged for problems and return visits.....then cheap becomes not so cheap

bathstore are well priced for what you are getting, items are of good quality and they have a no quibble warranty and will even compensate installers when things do go wrong

helping_hubby

I looked on ebay after we went to the bathstore and found 3 items that we got a quote for..
Radiator £99 + £8p&p instead of £199
Shower head (went for £45 inc P&P in the end) instead of £99 at shop
Basin tap & Waste £15 + £10P&P, no bids yet.

So I could save a few pounds there. But I didn't want to rush in a buy things for the sake of a bargain. I did bid on the shower head, but only a tenner. It was worth a try.

Canucklehead

Good morning: My OH (plumbing/heating engineer) recommends local, independent merchants to his clientele as they tend to sell quality gear at competitive prices and can give advice on the suitability of sanitary and brassware for your requirements (and no, he doesn't get any kickbacks for recommending them and vice versa). Some also use Bathstore with generally favourable results.

HTH

Canucklehead