Comparing quotes when I'm not sure what I want

Snakey

I have no experience whatsoever in DIY, building, plumbing, plastering, tiling, electrics, planning permission or anything related to any of this.

I want my bathroom doing, but I need the builder to advise me what my options are and what's easy/difficult/expensive etc and help me to come up with something I like and can afford.

But how do I do this when I also want to get 2-3 different quotes so that I can compare them? By definition, they won't be comparable because the work won't be the same because everyone I ask is going to have different suggestions and they'll probably all be just as good.

Or do I chat to all of them and then sit and decide what I want and then get back to them with a set specification to quote me for - even though what I say I want may then be nothing like what they originally advised me?

Presumably builders understand that people are going to get multiple quotes and won't be upset with me just because I get a quote (and related advice) and then go elsewhere, but I don't want to waste more of people's time than is reasonable.

How do people normally go about this?! I can't be the only person who isn't approaching this from a position of being a total expert, surely!

Any advice much appreciated, especially from the perspective of the other side.

nickj_2

you tell them what you want , then they'll sort out a price , s

don't worry about wasting peoples time , some you get , some you don't , if you're self employed you have to deal with that ,
i often price work up and i like to think that i price to do a, the job well and b correctly , however some customers just go on price and not what has been quoted for , ie, they are quite happy for someone to do an inferior job ,rather than having the job done well

Doozergirl

There is always a bit of a toss up between design and execution. Of course you can get advice from different people and of course you can change what it is that you want. We can only interpret and if it's something different then a firm will either try to accommodate that or not.

A word of advice is that the person that suggests something is hopefully going to be passionate and able to carry the job out. I don't think anyone can carry out what is in my head as well as I can. I have to explain it carefully to the team and check it all consistently if I'm being trusted to execute.

If you want design flair and crisp execution then it isn't going to be the cheapest quote.

Snakey

The problem is that I can't afford to have it exactly how I want it. In fact I have less than half the budget.

To me that means I can only afford half a bathroom, but I am hoping that a builder would look at it and say "well, why don't you do it like this instead?" and come up with creative solutions that I wouldn't even know existed.

It's not a question of wanting the work done cheaply at the expense of quality, more that I want to make sure nobody is taking advantage of me admitting that I have zero knowledge or experience of what things cost. If I only get one quote I would have no way of knowing whether that's been inflated or not.

curiosity101

Is it worth trying to describe what you want vs your budget here? To see if some people can give you some starter tips on where you might be able to save?

Snakey

What I wanted (and please don’t laugh at me expecting to get all this for my budget – I am not joking when I said I had no idea what things cost):

Wall knocked through between bathroom and toilet.
Block up bathroom door.
Re-hang the toilet door so it opens into the room instead of into the wall (I hope you know what I mean).
Move bath (which would otherwise be in the middle of the newly-enlarged room) to the side of the room next to the blocked-up door.
Move sink to where the bath used to be.
Move radiator to the other end of where the bath used to be.
Supply and fit new bath, sink, loo and a cupboard unit built in under the sink.
The loo (situated next to the sink) will also be boxed in so that there’s a shelf running along at the same level as the sink.
Not moving the loo, therefore not moving the soil pipe.
Plumb/wire everything in to its new location (including dual-fuel towel rail), supply and fit a really nice shower.
Supply and fit suspended ceiling and recessed lights.
Tile the whole thing including the floor.
Install extractor fan.
Take all the rubbish away.
Supply all bits and pieces to do the above.

The quote I got was £14,600 including VAT, which included an approximate allowance for fittings at £2,500 plus VAT and tiles at £1,000 plus VAT. So if they turned out to be more or less then that would feed through to my bill. I wanted nice stuff because there didn’t seem much point in doing all this work just to get the tiles from a skip and a shower head from the pound shop.

However… I was only planning on spending around £6-7k.

Yeah, laugh it up. It seems I can barely buy the materials for that.

Don’t ask me how I ended up in a situation where the quote was so far away from what I was expecting. I swear I told him up front what my budget was and that I had no idea what things cost and needed his guidance along the way to come up with something realistic. And then there was no further mention of cost throughout the whole discussion – so I just assumed that everything we were talking about could be done within my budget - until he presented me with a quote more than twice the size! I feel like he wasted my time but I suspect he feels like I wasted his time, and I feel bad about that, so I’ll just have to learn for the future to be twenty times clearer than I think I need to be to make sure there’s no confusion.

I’m thinking the main way to save money is to leave the two rooms separate. A lot of the building and moving-things-around work goes away. And then have cheaper stuff. I do want it all tiled if I can as I am told the room is prone to condensation/mould and I feel like it’d be easier to wipe tiles each day than to wipe walls. Could save by having cheaper kit. That’s about all I can think of, really, other than just crossing things off the list in reverse order of preference (do I really need a new loo? Do I really need a new sink? etc) until the cost gets low enough.

Dan-Dan

is the wall you want removing load bearing ? , i think you will find that that isnt the most expensive `segment` of proposed work even if it is, probably the tiling is where the the cost mounts up , we paid £220 a day for a bang on tiler.

The first thing you should do , is work out what standard of materials you can afford , and source them yourself as part of any next quoting discussion with a tradesman

Snakey

Nope, not load-bearing.

Good plan to see if I can sort out at least an estimate for the major items. Obviously there'll be behind-the-scenes widgets that I wouldn't know existed, but it would give me a place to put my feet.

Tiling part of the quote was £1k (just for the labour) based on 28 square meters (which I suppose I could go and measure, to see if that's correct or just a guess). I definitely don't want wonky tiles as I want to be able to clean them quickly and easily.

Owain_Moneysaver

Snakey wrote: »

Wall knocked through between bathroom and toilet.
Block up bathroom door.
Re-hang the toilet door so it opens into the room instead of into the wall (I hope you know what I mean).
Move bath (which would otherwise be in the middle of the newly-enlarged room) to the side of the room next to the blocked-up door.
Move sink to where the bath used to be.
Move radiator to the other end of where the bath used to be.
Supply and fit new bath, sink, loo and a cupboard unit built in under the sink.
The loo (situated next to the sink) will also be boxed in so that there’s a shelf running along at the same level as the sink.
Not moving the loo, therefore not moving the soil pipe.
Plumb/wire everything in to its new location (including dual-fuel towel rail), supply and fit a really nice shower.
Supply and fit suspended ceiling and recessed lights.
Tile the whole thing including the floor.
Install extractor fan.
Take all the rubbish away.
Supply all bits and pieces to do the above.

The bold bits are the expensive bits, or the potentially expensive bits. All the "moves" require floor lifting and plumbing altered.

Actually knocking the wall down (if it's non-supporting) is cheap; it's the making good the walls, floor and ceiling that costs.

Boxing in is expensive as it's labour intensive. Look at the vanity units from Screwfix etc. A toilet and a basin unit comes about £500.

A £60 thermostatic shower will get you as clean as a £400 one.

A new suspended ceiling is several days work even in a small room. Recessed lights aren't that good in bathrooms as they glare in your eyes when lying in the bath, and they're useless for shaving or makeup. Your electrician will usually charge per point.

Tiling is hugely variable in cost both for the tiles themselves and the tiling. Mosaic or very large tiles take longer to lay than standard 300x300 ceramic.

Snakey

The more I think about it, the more I think that if I can't have my dream bathroom I might as well not bother with the best-of-the-best for the shower and so on. The important thing with showers is that they're hot enough and that there's enough water coming out, both of which are no problem thanks to the boiler.

The only thing that absolutely has to be changed is that I need the shower (and presumably this also means the taps) to be at the other end of the bath, because the window is at the tap end and so there's nowhere to mount a shower. And there isn't a proper shower at the moment - it just comes up from where the taps are - and I would like to set the temperature without having to turn the two taps by trial and error, so it would be well worth the money to me to have something a little better than I have now. And I'd love a shower screen instead of a shower curtain which blows all over the place when I have the window open.

Heh... maybe I can get it down to a few hundred quid... I would like the tiles as well because I'm concerned about black mould (apparently the flat has had it badly in the past), so maybe I could do something there too as the big luxury item to make me feel like I've got something nice and new for my money.

Thanks for your input anyway, this has been very helpful.

Doozergirl

Are you in London? Which bit?

It sounds to me like you do know what you want!