Bathroom fitting across Teesside
Bathrooms and tiling are where this business started, and our bathroom fitters cover Teesside as a region rather than one town. Full refits, en-suites, wet rooms, level-access bathrooms and tiling, from Hartlepool and Billingham in the north down to Yarm, Stokesley and Great Ayton, with Middlesbrough, Stockton and the coast in between.
Most people reach this page having typed bathroom fitters Teesside into a phone and got back a list of names with no way to tell one from another. What follows is what the work involves, how we price it, and where we are the wrong firm to ring.
For its size, the conurbation holds an unusual spread of housing. Inside about twenty miles there are Georgian and Victorian rooms that were never designed to hold a bath, 1930s semis with the toilet in a cupboard of its own, post-war estates built to a handful of repeating house types, and private estates from the 1980s onward whose first bathrooms are now wearing out together. The right answer for a Linthorpe villa is not the right answer for a house on Coulby Newham, and the difference sits behind the wall rather than in the suite you choose.
What we take on
Five kinds of bathroom job, priced differently because they carry different risk.
| Job | What is involved | How we price it |
|---|---|---|
| Full refit | Strip-out, first fix, boarding and tanking, tiling, suite, finishing | One fixed written price after a survey |
| En-suite or second bathroom | A new room, so the drainage route and extraction are settled first, and new drainage means building regulations approval | Quoted once the waste run is confirmed |
| Wet room or level-access shower | Floor formed to a fall, fully tanked, tiled, screen or open | Quoted after the floor build-up is checked |
| Tiling only | Walls, floors and splashbacks, or retiling around a suite that stays | Priced by the room and the layout |
| Fitting only | You buy the suite, we install and commission it | Quoted once we have seen what you bought |
None of them are priced by the day. A day rate asks you to carry the cost of a week that runs slowly, and a bathroom is a room that can be measured and scoped before anyone starts, so it should be quoted whole. Open-ended repair work is a different matter, and that is where a rate genuinely belongs.
How long each of those takes
Working days on site, for a room that is being worked on rather than lived in. They do not vary by town, which is why they are stated here once rather than repeated under every place name.
| Job | What is actually involved | Typical time on site |
|---|---|---|
| Full refit, existing room | Strip out, strengthen floor, first fix, board, tank, tile, fit | 5–8 working days |
| Shower room from a bath | Waste re-sited, tray or wet area tanked, full re-tile | 4–6 working days |
| New bathroom in a spare room | Drainage route proved first, then stud, board, tile, fit | 6–9 working days |
| Top-floor en-suite | Flow measured, soil route planned, then a full build | 6–9 working days |
| Tiling only | Substrate assessed, corrected if needed, then set out and tiled | 2–4 working days |
Two of those durations depend on something outside the room. A new bathroom and a top-floor en-suite both start with proving the drainage route, and if the waste cannot reach the stack with the fall it needs, no amount of time on site fixes it. That is why the survey comes before the date.
Why one firm instead of four
A bathroom is the job where being multi-trade earns its keep, and the reason is geometry. The room is small, so the trades cannot overlap. Strip-out has to finish before the plumber can set the pipework, the electrician needs the walls open, the tanking has to cure before a tile goes on it, the plumber comes back for the suite, and someone makes good at the end.
Book that as four firms and you are not buying four prices, you are buying three gaps. Each gap is somebody else's diary, and none of them are answerable for the delay. It is also where responsibility gets blurred: when a shower leaks six months later, the tiler blames the tray bedding and the plumber blames the tiling.
Our own team covers the plumbing, the tiling, the electrical work and the decorating, with Gas Safe engineers in the same business for anything touching the boiler. One schedule, one written quote, one person to ring. The plumbing and electrical sides of the firm are the same people who turn up on a bathroom.
Tiling, and why it decides the finish
Tiling is the last trade in and the one that exposes everything done before it. That is why we treat it as the discipline of the job rather than the decoration at the end.
Three things do most of the work. Substrate, because a tile is only as flat as what it is stuck to, and large-format tiles are far less forgiving of a wall that runs out of true. Older Teesside stock rarely gives you a flat wall, so honest quoting means boarding out rather than hoping. Anything joined to the mains while we are in there has to meet the water fittings regulations, which is what WRAS approval on a fitting certifies. Setting out, which decides where the full tiles land and where the cuts go. A room tiled from the wrong starting point ends with a sliver of tile in the most visible corner, and nothing can be done about it afterwards. Falls and seals, because a floor that does not drain and a junction that is not sealed will fail regardless of what the tile cost.
The remedial jobs we get called to look at are almost never a failure of the tile itself. They are the boarding behind it, the bedding under a tray, or a silicone joint asked to do a tanking membrane's work.
What moves the price
More than anything else, whether the layout changes. Leaving the bath, basin and toilet where they are keeps the pipe runs short and the floor down. Moving the toilet means moving the soil connection, and that is the single most expensive decision available in a bathroom.
After that, the tiling. Half height on two walls and floor-to-ceiling on four are different jobs, and tiling is labour rather than materials. Then what is behind the old tiles, which nobody can see at survey and which in older property is often wet floor timber around the bath or waste pipework laid with almost no fall. Then the suite, which people expect to dominate the number and usually does not. Then the electrics and extraction, because retrofitting proper ventilation into a room that never had it is wiring work with paperwork attached, not a fan screwed to a wall. Ventilation rates for a bathroom are set by Approved Document F, and the circuit work is notifiable under Part P when it is in the zone around the bath or shower.
Access matters too, and it is the one people forget. A top-floor flat or a terrace with no rear lane adds time to strip-out and disposal.
None of that becomes a figure from a photograph, which is why we survey. If the budget is still an open question, where the money goes in a bathroom refit sets out which parts of the job carry the cost.
Bathrooms you can keep using
Level-access showers and wet rooms are a growing share of what we fit, and the brief is usually the same: stay in this house, and make the bathroom stop being the reason not to.
The work is structural rather than cosmetic. The floor is built to a fall towards the drain, the drain is sited where the joists allow rather than where the drawing prefers, and the whole wet area is tanked as one continuous surface before tiling. Get any of it wrong and the failure is not visible until it has been running into a ceiling for months.
It is not always possible. Where the floor void is too shallow to form a fall, a low-profile tray with a level threshold gives most of the benefit without pretending the structure is something it is not. That conversation belongs at survey, not halfway through.
Across the Teesside towns
Every town gets the same team and the same quote format, but not the same advice. Middlesbrough work runs from Victorian villas to student lets near the university, and the town pages set that out for Middlesbrough and Stockton-on-Tees. Hartlepool has hard water, which changes which shower valve is worth fitting rather than what it costs. Yarm brings listed and conservation-area property where the route for a new pipe or extract is a consent question first. Ingleby Barwick is the opposite problem: modern houses, sound pipework, and original fittings all reaching the end at once.
Landlords usually want the bathroom done inside a void week alongside everything else, and our between-tenancy checklist sets out which jobs belong in that week.
What the written quote contains
One fixed price against a specification you can read, listing the suite and materials, strip-out and disposal under our own licence, first fix plumbing and electrics, boarding and tanking, the tiling area, and the making good at the end. A schedule comes with it saying which days the room is out of use. You accept it online, in your own time, with no doorstep pressure.
If the strip-out finds something the survey could not, it reaches you as a written variation with a price attached before the work happens. That single mechanism is what stops a bathroom from drifting, and it is the thing worth asking any fitter to explain before you sign anything.
When we are the wrong choice
If it is one item swapped for the same item in the same place, a good independent plumber will be quicker to book and cheaper than us, and we will say so rather than build a refit around it. If you want the lowest number in the region, we will not be it, because boarding, tanking and licensed disposal are in ours and are invisible on handover day. If you want to keep the existing tiling and change only the suite, be told now that tiles rarely survive a bath coming out. And if you need it finished this week, curing times do not negotiate.
Getting a price
Tell us the room, the property and roughly what you have in mind, and we will arrange a survey. Send us the details and you get a written quote to keep, or look through recent work first if you would rather see finished rooms before speaking to anybody.
The survey is where the figure comes from, so it helps to have a rough idea of the layout you want and to know whether the suite is bought or still to choose. What comes back is one fixed price against a written specification, with a schedule attached showing which days the room is out of use.
