Bathroom Fitters in Marske-by-the-Sea

Fitting a bathroom in a Marske house

Marske-by-the-Sea was built in three distinct bursts, and for bathroom fitters that produces three genuinely different jobs. The old village near the coast road and the cliff-top churchyard has small rooms, solid walls and floors that are rarely level. New Marske, up the hill, is a post-war estate of repeating house types where the original bathroom was laid out around a bath and very little else. Out towards Longbeck the housing is later and more conventional, and the question there is usually whether to add a second room rather than replace the first.

Bathrooms and tiling are the trade this business started in, and our own team covers the plumbing, the tiling and the electrical work, so a refit is one firm and one diary rather than three.

The short version

Five to eight working days on site for a full refit. We survey the room as built rather than as remembered, and quote in writing with the materials listed. Nothing is stripped out until the materials are here, because a household without a bathroom waiting on a delivery is the worst way to run a job.

What each kind of job involves

What Marske properties throw up

No spare inches in the village. The older cottages and terraces near the coast road have bathrooms that were fitted into whatever space was available when indoor plumbing arrived, which was usually a back addition or a corner of a bedroom. Floors are seldom level, walls are often solid, and a deep chase for a concealed cistern is not always something the wall will give you. The practical answer is a survey with a spirit level and a tape before a single product is chosen, because in a room this size fifteen millimetres decides whether a door still opens.

One house type, repeated, at New Marske. The estate up the hill was built to a small number of designs, which works in your favour. We have usually seen the room before, we know roughly where the soil stack sits and how the airing cupboard eats into the space, and we can be specific about what a layout change costs before quoting rather than after. The recurring job here is converting a bathroom built around a bath into a shower room that gets used every day.

Floor build-up decides level access. A level-access shower needs somewhere for the waste to go beneath the floor, and that is a joist question upstairs and a slab question downstairs. It is entirely doable in most Marske houses and the answer is not the same in all of them, so we establish it before designing anything rather than promising a flush finish and then producing a step.

Windows that stay shut. This is a coastal town with an open aspect, and bathroom windows here get opened a good deal less than the specification for a fan assumes, particularly between October and March. A fan properly ducted to outside, sized for the room and given a decent run, is the difference between a bathroom that still looks new in three years and one with mould in the grout. It is a small line on a quote and it is not the place to save money.

Later houses towards Longbeck. Conventional construction, stud walls, and layouts that do what you expect. The interesting question here is rarely whether the room can be refitted and usually whether an en-suite or a downstairs WC can be added. That comes down to where the soil stack is and whether a new waste can reach it with the fall it needs.

Where a refit actually goes wrong

Almost never the suite. It is the substrate. Tiles fixed to a board that should have come out, a wet area that was never properly tanked, or a timber floor with enough movement in it to crack a grout line within a season. None of that is visible on the day the job finishes, which is exactly why it gets skipped. We tank wet areas as a matter of course, we replace boarding rather than tile over it, and we stiffen a floor that needs it before anything goes down.

When we are the wrong choice

If you want the cheapest suite fitted in the shortest time, we are not the right firm and we would rather say that at the quote. We will not tile over a substrate that ought to come out, we will not fit a shower valve onto a supply we have measured and know cannot feed it, and we will not build a level-access floor where the build-up is not there and call the resulting step a design feature.

How the job runs

We survey the room, measure the supply, and confirm where the waste can go. You get a written quote listing the work and the materials, which you can accept online without a doorstep conversation. We book a start date and confirm it the day before. Strip-out, first fix, boarding, tanking, tiling, second fix and sealing run in sequence with our own trades, photographed as they go, and the room is cleared each evening.

If the plumbing elsewhere in the house is due attention, mention it at quoting stage, because the time to do it is while the water is already off. New circuits and the fan are run by our own electricians. Our note on what drives the cost of a new bathroom explains where the money actually goes, and you can send us the details to get a survey booked.