Bathroom Fitters in Washington

Bathroom fitting in Washington

Washington was designed rather than grown. It was built as a new town in numbered villages, and the practical consequence for bathroom work is that the housing repeats. The same house type runs down one side of Oxclose and turns up again in Barmston. Once you have worked on one, you know where the soil stack is, what the floor is built from and what the strip-out is going to find.

That is worth more than it sounds. Most of what makes a bathroom cost more than the quote said is the thing nobody could see beforehand. Here there is less of it.

The short version

• One team, one fixed written quote covering strip-out through to finishing.
• The house types repeat, so the survey is more predictive here than anywhere else we work.
• Keeping the layout is the biggest saving available. Moving the toilet is the expensive change.
• Written variations only if the strip-out finds something. Priced before it is done.

What a full refit includes

What Washington housing does to a bathroom

Concord, Oxclose and the 1960s and 1970s villages. Efficient layouts, compact bathrooms, and construction that is entirely predictable once you know the type. The usual finds are an original extractor that was never adequate and a floor that has been wet at the bath end for longer than anyone realised. Both are ordinary. Neither is expensive when it is expected.

Barmston and the later phases. Newer construction, sound bathrooms, refits driven by age and taste rather than failure. The most straightforward work in the town.

Fatfield and Rickleton. The older and larger property, predating the new town in places, and the exception to everything above. Here the bathroom is more likely to be a converted room with a retrofitted waste, and the survey does real work rather than confirming what we already expect.

Lets across the town. The statutory list does not move with a refit: a gas check every 12 months, an electrical report at intervals of no more than five years, and a reported disrepair that is easier to answer with photographs already on file. There is a substantial rental market here and the sensible money goes into what gets used rather than what gets looked at. A shower valve that can be serviced outlasts one that photographs well, and extraction that actually vents outside prevents most of the mould complaints a landlord fields.

Buying from a retailer, or from us

Showrooms are useful. Seeing a suite in person tells you things a website will not.

Where a retailer package differs from us is not usually price but structure. The fitting is subcontracted, so the plumbing, electrics and tiling may be three separate trades on three separate schedules, and the person you ring in six months is the retailer rather than the fitter. If that matters to you, we are the alternative. If it does not, and the package is good value, take it. In this housing stock, where the work is predictable, a good retailer package is more likely to be genuinely competitive than it is in older property.

We also fit suites customers have bought elsewhere, and we would rather see what you have before the job starts.

Washington is Sunderland for administrative purposes, so the notice goes to the city's planning and building control rather than to Durham — worth knowing on a new town whose postal address suggests otherwise. Altered drainage is building regulations work, and extraction is sized by Approved Document F.

When we are the wrong choice

A full refit is not the right answer to every bathroom problem, and in housing this predictable the smaller job is more often the right one than people expect. These are the cases where we would point you elsewhere.

• If it is a like-for-like swap of a single item, a good plumber is cheaper and quicker.
• If you want the cheapest possible refit, we are not it. We tank wet areas properly and will not skip it.
• If the property is a let and the budget is set at the lowest possible figure, a local plumber and a merchant suite will beat us. That is a fair answer and sometimes the right one.
• If you want the existing tiling kept and only the suite changed, the tiles rarely survive removing a bath cleanly.
• If you need it finished in three days, tanking and adhesive curing do not negotiate.

How the quote and the job run

Somebody surveys the room, which on a known Concord or Oxclose house type is quick and on a Fatfield property genuinely is not. You get one written fixed price for a defined specification and a schedule naming the days it is out of use, accepted online rather than on the doorstep.

In Concord and the older villages the variation is the pair we expect: an original extractor that was never adequate, and a floor wet at the bath end for longer than anyone realised. Neither is expensive when it is expected, and both come to you priced and in writing first. Completed work is photographed, which matters most for the tanking and the pipework about to be covered up.

Washington sits between three of our other areas, so we also cover bathroom fitting in Sunderland, Gateshead and Chester-le-Street. Our guide to what a new bathroom costs sets out where the money goes, and the landlord between-tenancy checklist is worth a read if the property is let.