Bathrooms in Burbage, priced in writing before anything starts.
A bathroom is a question of where the water can go, and in the Burbage core the front of the building is effectively off limits, which narrows it.
With the house standing on the footpath, a soil pipe on the front elevation is both a conservation area problem and a practical one, since it would sit within touching distance of the public pavement. Everything routes to the rear. On a small cottage that can genuinely limit where a bathroom can go, and it is worth working out before a suite is chosen rather than after.
Floors are the second constraint. Older upstairs joists were sized for a bedroom, not for a filled bath on a tiled floor, and in a small cottage the spans are short but the timbers are often light. Where a waste run means notching or drilling them there are permitted zones, and we will move a fitting a foot rather than cut a joist where it must not be cut.
Ventilation gets treated as an afterthought and causes years of trouble. An extractor discharging into a roof void puts moisture straight back into the building and in an older Burbage roof it finds the timber.
Tanking is not optional on a walk in shower. 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 Hinckley & Bosworth Borough 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 Burbage street to the next.
In a cottage 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.
A cast iron bath coming out of an upstairs room in a village cottage goes down a narrow staircase and out onto a public footpath. That is a two person job with the pavement briefly occupied, and it is worth doing at a sensible hour rather than at school run time.
Where a soil vent pipe cannot be taken up a protected front elevation, an air admittance valve inside the building is sometimes the answer, and sometimes it is not, because at least one vent to open air is needed on a system. Which applies depends on the rest of the drainage, so it is worked out at the survey rather than improvised on the second day.
Part of our wider building work in Burbage.
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.
