Bathroom Fitters in Marton, Middlesbrough

Bathroom fitting in Marton

Marton is a suburb of two ages, and the bathroom is where the difference shows first. The 1930s semis at the Tollesby end and in the streets around Marton village were built with a small bathroom and a separate WC beside it, each of them sized for exactly what it held and nothing more. The 1960s and 1970s detached houses around Marton Manor were built with more upstairs space but a fixed idea about how to use it: one family bathroom, an internal soil stack boxed into a cupboard, and no provision for a second one.

So most of what we do in this part of Middlesbrough is one of two jobs. Either we turn a bathroom and a WC into a single room that works, or we add a second bathroom to a house that has the floor area for it and never had the drainage designed for it. Bathrooms and tiling are our own trade, and the plumbing, tiling and electrical work is done by our own people rather than handed to somebody else's diary.

The short version

Five to eight working days for a full refit. Every job is surveyed before it is quoted, because on this housing the first question is always where a waste can run and with what fall. Marton is a short run from our base in TS3, so getting people and materials to the door is not usually the variable.

What each kind of job involves

We do not begin a strip-out until the materials are on site. A family living around a stripped bathroom while a delivery is chased is the worst way to run a job, and it is avoidable by ordering properly.

What Marton houses throw up

The wall between the bathroom and the WC. In the 1930s semis this is the whole job in miniature. Taking it out is straightforward. What follows it is not automatic: the soil pipe usually enters at the WC end, the window is usually in the bathroom end, and a layout that ignores either produces a room that looks right on paper and is awkward to stand in. We set out the room around the fixed points first and put the suite in afterwards.

Joist direction and fall. Upstairs floors here are suspended timber, and a waste needs continuous fall to reach the stack. If the joists run the wrong way for the route you want, the options are a different route, a raised deck in part of the room, or a pumped waste, and each of those has a consequence worth knowing about before the floor comes up rather than after.

Boxed internal stacks in the 1970s houses. On the Marton Manor housing the soil stack is commonly inside the building, boxed into a cupboard or a corner of the landing. That is good news for an en-suite, because the connection you need is often nearer than it looks, and it is the first thing we check when somebody asks whether a second bathroom is possible.

Ventilation that goes nowhere. A recurring find in both eras: an extractor fan that runs into a loft void, or a duct that has come adrift above the ceiling. The room gets damp, the decoration fails, and the fan gets blamed. A new bathroom needs the extract to actually leave the building, and that is part of the quote rather than an upgrade.

Sound tiling on unsound backing. Older bathrooms in these houses often have tile over tile, or tile over a board that has been wet for years. We take it back to something we can guarantee. Tiling over a substrate that should have come out is the cheapest way to make a new bathroom fail in two years.

The en-suite question

Marton has a steady market for en-suites and extensions, and the two are frequently the same conversation. If a bedroom is being extended over a garage or into a rear addition, the en-suite is far cheaper designed in at that stage than retrofitted later, because the drainage and the circuit go in while the floor is open. Where an extension is involved, our building and renovation work is quoted in the same document. Where hot water rather than layout is the real complaint, the heating page covers sizing.

When we are the wrong choice

If you want the cheapest suite fitted quickest, we are not the firm and we would rather say so at the quote. We will not fit a high-output shower onto a supply we have measured and know will not feed it, we will not tile over a substrate that has failed, and we will not put a waste in at a fall we know is marginal because a customer prefers that layout. A bathroom that disappoints every morning is worse than a fortnight of inconvenience.

How the job runs

We survey the room, confirm the drainage and check the supply. You get a written quote listing the work and the materials, which you can accept online. We book a start date and confirm it the day before. Strip-out, first fix, boarding, tanking, tiling, second fix and sealing run in order with our own trades, photographed as they go. Finished rooms are on our our work pages, and if you want a date in the diary the contact form is the quickest route.

Marton sits inside Middlesbrough, and the Middlesbrough bathroom page covers the older terraced stock in the rest of the town. Next door in Nunthorpe the housing is different again, and so is the usual job.