Bathrooms in Northampton, priced in writing before anything starts.
The terraced housing in the boot and shoe streets was not built with bathrooms in it, and that single fact explains most of what we find when we open one up.
A bathroom in one of these houses arrived later, usually somewhere between the 1930s and the 1970s, and it almost always went into the rear addition or over it. That addition was built as a scullery or a workspace on the cheapest foundations on the plot, and nobody who built it in 1890 imagined it would one day carry a filled bath, a tiled floor and a tanked shower enclosure. Sometimes it was strengthened when the bathroom went in. Frequently it was not.
So the first thing we do here is look at what the bathroom is standing on rather than what it looks like. A floor that flexes when you walk across it, a door that has started binding, or tiles cracking along a consistent line are all worth understanding before a new suite goes in on top. Fitting a heavier bathroom onto a structure that was already marginal is how a modest refit turns into a structural job halfway through.
Where the structure does need attention we would rather find it at the survey and price it openly than discover it once the old suite is out and you have no bathroom. That is the point in a job when nobody has any good options.
The rest is the usual discipline. Waste runs work to the permitted zones in the joists, extraction goes outside rather than into a roof void, and the wet area is properly tanked because tiles and grout have never been a waterproof layer. Our bathroom installations page sets out what a full refit involves.
Four things we commit to on every job, rather than four things we say about ourselves.
Permitted development is not an exemption from Building Regulations. We arrange the West Northamptonshire Council inspections, meet the inspector on site at each stage and see the work through to sign off. We do not make the application itself, and we will tell you what is needed and when.
Free, and you get it before you commit to us. Party walls and skip licences are raised at quotation stage, not three weeks into the dig.
The same people do the groundworks, the brickwork and the fit out. Nobody hands your job to a subcontractor you have never met.
You get a straight answer rather than a padded price. It costs us a job occasionally and saves you a great deal more.
Process, specification and what moves the price are set out on our bathrooms page.
The answers that genuinely differ from one Northampton street to the next.
Because the bathroom in these houses is usually at the back, and many of these plots have a rear entry from the old working yards, the strip out is often easier here than the frontage would suggest. Where there is a rear route we use it, which keeps the mess out of the hall entirely.
In a house with one bathroom the whole household is affected for the duration, so we plan the strip out and first fix inside the same week and leave the existing toilet connected as long as the plumbing allows.
Water here is hard, which shortens the life of a shower valve and furs a rainfall head until the spray pattern goes patchy. Fittings that can genuinely be descaled and serviced are worth more over ten years than the difference in the purchase price.
Part of our wider building work in Northampton.
Send photographs and a rough brief, or call and talk it through. We will tell you if a job is not right for us.
Southfield Construction (Rugby) Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company 14209138.
