Bathroom Renovations & Fitting

Why bathrooms decide whether a property lets

Ask any letting agent in Greater Manchester which room loses them viewings and they will say the bathroom. A dated kitchen reads as tired. A dated bathroom reads as unclean, fairly or not, and tenants will pay noticeably more for a property with a modern shower and clean tiling.

It is also the room where poor workmanship shows up fastest. A bathroom that was tiled straight onto plasterboard without tanking will start failing within two years, and by the time it is visible the damage is behind the tiles.

How we build a bathroom

We strip the room back to the joists and studs. Anything soft comes out. Waste and supply pipework is renewed rather than reused, the room is rewired with the extraction, lighting and shaver point on appropriate circuits, and the walls in wet areas are boarded with tile backer board and tanked with a liquid membrane before a single tile goes on.

Floors are levelled and, where they are timber, overboarded and decoupled so the tiling does not crack as the floor moves. Then it is tiled, fitted, grouted and sealed.

• Strip-out to the structure and waste removal
• New hot, cold and waste pipework
• Full electrical rewire, Part P certified
• Extractor fan sized and installed to Part F
• Tile backer board and liquid tanking to wet areas
• Floor levelling, decoupling and underfloor heating if specified
• Full-height tiling, sanitaryware and brassware installation
• Grouting, sealing, decoration and final commissioning

Landlord bathrooms and second bathrooms

For rental property we usually recommend a shower over bath in a single-bathroom house, and a walk-in shower where a second bathroom exists. Wall-hung sanitaryware and full-height tiling both make cleaning between tenancies much easier, which matters more than it sounds.

Adding a second bathroom or en-suite is one of the strongest returns in shared housing. In a five or six bed HMO in Fallowfield, Withington or Rochdale, a second bathroom will typically pay for itself inside a year through reduced voids and higher per-room rent.

Damp, ventilation and the things behind the tiles

Most bathroom damp is condensation, not leaks. An undersized or unswitched extractor in a room with a daily shower produces enough moisture to black-mould a ceiling within a winter, and repainting it every year does not fix it.

Every bathroom we fit gets extraction sized to the room with an overrun timer, and where a property has a history of condensation we will discuss continuous background ventilation. It is a small cost that removes a recurring maintenance complaint.