I’m just after a ballpark figure, we have an ensuite that’s 2m x 2.3m that’s a normal bathroom at the moment but we ideally would like to turn into a wet room.

I’ve got a rough price from my local bathroom place of £5k to walk in as it is now and hand it back all finished. Price includes all materials and labour etc, but price could go up or down a bit depending of suite choices and tiles but this is an average of what they’ve done in the past.

Has anyone had anything similar done recently to give me an idea if this is about right please?

My parents recently did this.They used wickes for supply and installation, existing bathroom completely stripped and new shower, tiles floor to ceiling, heated towel rail, paint etc and it was £7k all in. I thought it was expensive but done to a high standard.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Have you considered that the room will be mostly wet most of the time?

Might not be ideal on the midnight trip to the loo…

Do it properly and it’ll be bone dry half an hour after you finish showering.

FWIW we paid about €6.5k for one 4 years ago. Getting the other bathroom done soon. That’ll be about €10k.

5K sounds cheap with all materials and labour. Our average price for installation on bathrooms this year has been 3k labour only.

Wet room floors take quite a lot of planning to do right and can be time consuming depending on the level of prep work required.

We paid around £7k (pretty much the same size as yours) but decided against a wet room and went for a large walk in shower instead.

There are different ways of doing wetrooms so find out exactly how they’re proposing to waterproof it. Unless your floor is very solid – which is unusual if it’s wooden joists, and very unusual if it’s an older house- stopping a tiled floor cracking at the grout lines is difficult.

Do it properly and it’ll be bone dry half an hour after you finish showering.

Define properly. The UK has a damp climate for a lot of the year which means I don’t think wetrooms work well here – I notice you’re pricing in Euros. In hot dry countries or even properly cold dry winters they can work but in the UK you probably need to overheat the floor with electric underfloor heating to get it dry even with a powerful extractor fan.

Our new house has low temperature underfloor heating and heat recovery ventilation which is humidity controlled – towels will dry in about 6 hours hanging on a rail. Water splashed out of the semi open shower tray takes some hours to disappear. In our old Victorian house the towels wouldn’t dry properly even on a heated rail and the floor would stay wet for ages.

Factor in a sum to cover replacing the ceiling downstairs in 6 months time.

Unless your floor is very solid – which is unusual if it’s wooden joists, and very unusual if it’s an older house- stopping a tiled floor cracking at the grout lines is difficult.

It really isn’t. not if it’s done properly. but as mentioned above, avoid going too cheap with wet rooms as a lot of the cost is the labour, which if skipped/fast tracked could lead to problems.

Tiles themselves aren’t waterproof 100% so it’s paramount that the floor beneath them is! Prep and planning is everything in a wet room project.

It really isn’t. not if it’s done properly

Which is the same thing – it’s rarely done properly and I think you’ve contradicted yourself on the very next line.

Pretty much any tile you’d think about for a bathroom will be 100% waterproof – no water gets through a porcelain tile. The weak point is always the grout joint – the waterproofing underneath is basically dealing with the fact that the grout joints on the floor will almost inevitably fail.

Properly involves replacing floor boards with ply (IMO) and using a preformed high density foam/fibreglass panel (Wedi-board etc)shaped to send the water drainwards. Similar boards on the rest of floor and thinner ones on walls. All joints taped and sealed prior to tiling.
Tile straight onto the ply and it will leak sooner or later.

I’ve not contradicted myself, I said if a floor is not prepped and layed properly then it could fail. which includes making it stiff enough to tile by over boarding and making it waterproof by taping and tanking. A professional in the trade SHOULD prep and lay properly, I know I do. It’s not difficult to do though.

Tiles are NOT 100% waterproof, none of them. Very, Very water resistant in most cases I’ll grant you, but not waterproof, hence the requirement to tank.

I know all about the UK climate. I lived there for decades. And all we’ve had here since the wetroom was done is damp and miserable. Except for about 4 weeks each summer and 8 weeks each winter…… funnily enough, Christmas day this year was drier, warmer and less humid than midsummer……

Just get a really big shower tray and a curtain.

Wet rooms are stupid ideas even when you do them totally right or they are massive. Possibly only useful for serial killers.

What about a nice big walk in shower? Much much cheaper, easier to keep clean etc etc.

Thanks for all of the advice, I think you’ve all persuaded me to go for a walk in shower rather than a wet room now. All I need to do is persuade my wife 😕

Just to add, we inherited a wet room in our house. Every shower I have to use a squeegee blade to wipe away excess water or it’s still there about 12 hours later!

[pedant mode]

It’s en suite.

[off]

Tiles are NOT 100% waterproof, none of them. Very, Very water resistant in most cases I’ll grant you, but not waterproof, hence the requirement to tank.

I’ve learnt something new – thanks.

AAMOI isn’t there a building code or something that specifies the construction of wet rooms in such a way that they are watertight?

Last normal bathroom i did was 4k all in, nearly twice the size. but the pottery and brassware was on the cheaper side of things, i would say 5k was not bad for a wet room.

Just to add to what others have said, having had a decent sized wet room en suite, it’s amazing quite howmlittlemstayed dry, and how long to dry out. I think they look great, but I’d be after a large shower enclosure / screen without doors at the very least to keep most of the room dry.
Cost wise, £5k is about right, but they are absolutely diyable if you’ve got a lot of time.

Ohh and our walk in has an ultra slim tray so there is no step up from the tiles either. Not cheap but looks really good.

Cheaper than a wet room floor!

Exactly what I’ll be doing shortly Johndoh

£5k seems a good price. We paid slightly more recently, but all the brassware and the tiles themselves were fairly top end. Thought about a full wet room, but went for a large walk-in shower with minimal height tray and a glass screen instead.
Very happy with the end result, and will be waterproof for the foreseeable future.

When we build our retirement Huf house facing west over a Scottish loch the wet rooms will be built into the structure, along with the other pre-requisite, a warm, well-ventilated and well lit bike workshop and mountain equipment store.

Unless you can position the shower head at least 2m from the bit of floor required to use your sink and toilet then you will get wet feet all the time. Some sort of walk-in is much better. Could possibly use a wedi shower tray tiled over to match the rest of the floor, with a frameless glass screen to give a wet room look without so much water everywhere.

I personally wouldnt tile a bathroom floor without uncoupling the installation and once youve done that you a good way towards being waterproof
If you get into the schluter system, its not hard to create a wet room (but ot cheap). There’s no way it would only cost you 5k. For a decent quality porcelain tile, half that budget has probably already gone on tile and setting materials (for 4 walls and floor). The rest on electrical, plumbing, structure, fixtures and fittings but no room left for labor?
Ive seen cheap jobs done and they’re, well, a bit disapointing.
Make sure you see their previous work and take time to understand whats under your tile and touch the toilets, sinks and faucets in the showroom before you choose!

Back in the office now and just found the tray we fitted…

http://www.traymateproducts.com/TM25.html

Done a similar style fitting too – ours is against two walls so the third side is a plain sheet glass screen and and splashes to the forth projection just go onto the tiled wall/floor. We usually then just quickly squeegee up any excess, but it has been designed with a slight drop towards the drain so water doesn’t end up running all over the floor.

Why not use a welded vinyl floor instead of tiles?

For our new EnSuite we fitted a Just Trays linear tray. Two sides to the wall, glass screen down 2/3 of the long side. Porcelain 60×60 tiles on the floor over Schluter membrane.
http://www.just-trays.com/products/jt-naturals/

Of course the weak point is the join between the floor and the tray but that only ever gets splashed.

Seamless tiled floors look great into a shower but having lived with one for 10 years (fitted over a fibreglass wetroom floor base) I’d not do it again. Cutting the tiles into a central drain was a hugely time consuming job, the grout cracked around the drain and the grout lines on the floor would always be dirty.