Bathrooms in Coventry, priced in writing before anything starts.
A bathroom is mostly a question of where the water can go, and in Coventry the answer depends on whether the front of your house is protected.
On a modern house the soil stack is internal and moving a bathroom is straightforward. On the older terraces it is on an outside wall, and if that wall faces the street inside a conservation area or under one of the city’s Article 4 directions, then altering it is a conversation with the council rather than a decision on site. Behind the building line there is far more freedom, which is why most of the bathrooms we move end up at the back of the house.
Floors are the second constraint. Older upstairs joists were sized for a bedroom, not for a filled bath on a tiled floor. Where a waste run means notching or drilling them there are permitted zones, and the wrong cut in the wrong place is common and serious. 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 afterwards. An extractor discharging into a roof void puts the moisture straight back into the building. We duct it outside.
Tanking is not optional on a walk in shower. Tiles and grout are not a waterproof layer and never were, so the wet area gets tanked properly. 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 Coventry City 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 Coventry street to the next.
In a terrace with one bathroom the whole house is affected for the duration, so we plan the strip out and the 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 still turn up in Coventry’s older stock and both change the day if they appear unexpectedly.
If the plan is a bathroom for a shared house rather than a family home, say so at the start, because the standards are not the same. Coventry has an Article 4 direction covering new houses in multiple occupation and a licensing regime on top of it, and the layout, the ventilation and the fire separation all get judged against a different rulebook. Fitting a domestic bathroom into a property that is about to be let room by room is a false economy.
Part of our wider building work in Coventry.
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.
