Bathrooms in Stratford-upon-Avon, priced in writing before anything starts.
A bathroom in a Stratford historic building raises a genuine technical conflict, and it is worth setting out plainly.
A modern bathroom is a sealed, waterproofed box. A timber framed or solid walled historic building works by letting moisture move through the fabric and evaporate. Putting the first inside the second without thought traps water against historic timber, which is the most effective way of rotting a frame that has stood for four hundred years. The answer is not to avoid bathrooms in old buildings, it is to confine the fully tanked wet area to where it is genuinely needed and to keep the external fabric breathable everywhere else.
Ventilation carries more weight here than in a modern house for the same reason, and an extractor discharging into a roof void puts moisture straight into the structure you are trying to protect.
There is a consent dimension as well. In a listed building, subdividing a historic room to form an en suite, removing original joinery or cutting into a decorative ceiling can all need listed building consent. Where a room genuinely cannot take a bathroom without damaging what makes it worth listing, we will say so, even though it is not what anybody wants to hear.
Floors bring the usual older building considerations of long spans and previous notching. 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 Stratford-on-Avon District 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 Stratford-upon-Avon street to the next.
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.
Cast iron waste and lead supply pipe both turn up regularly in the older stock here, and both change the day if they appear unexpectedly. We would rather find them at the survey.
Where original fittings or joinery are being removed from a listed building we ask first and record what was there, because putting something back is far harder than leaving it alone.
Where the honest answer is that a particular historic room should not take a bathroom, we say so at the survey rather than taking the work and damaging something irreplaceable.
Part of our wider building work in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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.
