[Closed] New bathroom time...

Can't advise on the specifics of boilers, but we have a 28kw combi, which is fine for a rainfall shower in the loft. AIUI, it's to do with your inbound water pressure and the width of the pipes to the boiler, rather than the boiler itself.

We got our bathroom porcelain stuff from the local merchant (Sureheat) via the fitter - the prices were roughly equivalent to internet without having to deal with deliveries etc.

We bought the taps etc (HansGrohe) from the internet as they are easy to send back if crap.

Showers

It'll be the usual caveat I suppose, you get what you pay for. I think the rule applies here, certainly to shower kit, altho the price of most decent rainshower heads is eye watering., so much so that I made do with a perfectly adequate handheld and so far have sacked off the rainshower head.

Certainly when I was doing the research, Grohe, Hansgrohe kit was more solid and a quality look and feel. A lot of other stuff was decidedly cheap looking and flimsy (looked like the chrome finish was on plastic and would rub off).

Vado looked/felt ok, Crosswater looked/felt ok.

I went with Hansgrohe Handheld / slide rail (from German website), Grohe arm, Ideal Standard thermostat control (ebay, surplus to requirement). Rainshower head yet to buy

Re water pressure, it'll be the same pressure whatever you have fitted. The point is, it'll be no worse pressure than if you had a standard electric shower, in fact probably a bit better or much better, but never worse. AND it'll look much nicer

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Bath/Toilet/Basin

think I bought it all from bathandshower about £850 in total

Didn't have much choice as I had to go with an extra long toilet to fit a floor waste pipe, was Twyfords and seems good quality.

If you don't want to spend a fortune then I'm happy with the acrylic square bath which has a nicer finish than the old style plastic baths, don't think it cost more than £320. Would have been nice to have a fancy bath, but I couldn't afford/warrant it.

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I fit a few bathrooms and always find Alan T Carr's Technique range is good quality and value.  Maybe find a local supplier.

Alan T Carr

He gets about a bit!

Having just refitted my own bathroom I'd check carefully before buying Grohe. Its very nice quality and looks fab but I didn't carefully read the bore size of the tap inlets. The taps I got are only 8mm which is totally inadequate on a gravity fed system. I used 22mm pipes up to the tap tails but its just a trickle out of the bath taps. I wish I'd chosen Bristan which have a much bigger bore.

Hot water cylinder for me. I used an integrated pump aqualisa shower. Its works great and looks good but it's a lot of shiny plastic close up!

We got a real mix of stuff, just going with a style we liked at a price we could afford/justify. Shower run off a combi (think it's rated at 31kw for hot water) and it's fine, there's a very slight dip in pressure if someone turns a tap on but no temp change

V&B Bath and Toilet

Crosswater bath filler and plug

Matki mixer valve

Hansgrohe eco shower head

Ikea bargain basement vanity unit and basin ( the amount bathroom places wanted for some foil wrapped particle board was astronomical)

Bristan mixer tap

Most of it came from a local plumbing place who ended up being no more expensive than anywhere else and was glad I could just return to the showroom when it took us 3 attempts to get a non-faulty toilet.

Thanks folks, lots of things to think about. I've already been in contact with local suppliers and my intention is to go that route unless they're way over on certain items (for example I'm not paying £400 for a mirrored cabinet with internal shaving socket when they're on the Internet for under £200).

Has anyone installed a back-to-wall toilet (so cistern hidden in the wall) and regretted it? I've had to replace the ball valve in my normal cistern (although admittedly only once in 20 years) and I'm not convinced the improved aesthetics warrants all the hassle of having to re-tile etc (or are the solutions for tiling on access doors etc.)?

My current bathroom is crap, all cheap stuff, carpet on the floor and shower just run off bath taps with no pump (gravity fed system at the moment), so anything's going to be an improvement - I just figure if it's not much more to get some fancy bits and pieces I may as well (I've no intention of selling any time soon).

Presume you mean a concealed cistern rather than back to wall toilet. We have a back to wall toilet but no concealed cistern. We would have had to build a little fake wall to conceal the cistern in with our bathroom design so would have been pointless. There are ways to ensure access though.

Yep got two concealed grohe toilet ... instructions to fit look complicated but was pretty easy and you can get to all the internals via the flush plate on front/top. ... think they worked out a bit cheaper then a "nice" cistern.

Good Luck.

I went for Duravit ceramics which are quite understated but still stylish. If you have a small bathroom try to keep stuff off the floor by using a half pedestal on the basin and a suspended toilet with concealed cistern. this aids cleaning no end and makes the room look less cluttered.  I fitted a Geberit toilet unit which has a steel frame to suspend the toilet on and has a cistern built in. All cistern parts are replaceable via the flush plate. Fitting a water softener stops the awful scum and scale forming-our bathroom still looks new 3 years on.

We have that Viessmann boiler and the shower still keeps going fine if washing machine/tap switched on.

As above fitter told us it’s about your pressure and diameter of pipes

Your on a standard gravity fed system, no way you’ll get a rainfall shower to work properly unless you pump it. Also be careful on taps. If you’ve got the old school twist taps and 22mm hot pipe you’ll be seriously disappointed. Mine are low pressure and they are still crap. It’s not really down to pressure and pipe diameter as a straightforward gravity system is cistern fed so if it’s a first floor bathroom with tank in loft you just won’t get enough fall for pressure, and even with 22mm bore hot you still reduce it down to 15mm and the isolators take a bit more off unless you use full bore ones. Taps are about 6mm by the time you’ve fitted the flex tails. My old bathroom looked dreadful but I could fill a bath whilst on the toilet. I now but the bath on and come back 10 minutes later and it’s still only about 5 inches full!

I now regret not putting a pressurised system in when I did mine. All mine came from travis perkins. If your not prepared to change the system to combi or pressurised I’d go with an electric shower personally, the pumps are really noisy and you really need to pump the whole hot system. As long as you’ve got a decent electric feed in there, I put in a big enough feed for a 10.8kw shower, wouldn’t want much less.

I fit Bathrooms and Kitchens for a living, nearly all of the above is correct.

I have a Veismann combi boiler myself and it’s fine for rain showers, gravity no way,  as mentioned it’s all about incoming pressure, in a gravity there isn’t any!!

Hansgrohe stuff is good quality but also as mentioned, won’t work on gravity due to being designed for European HP water services, it’s fine on a combi or an unvented (megaflo)  If cheaper needed then VADO is worth a look, or Rhoper Rhodes etc.

if you have time and know what you’re looking for, eBay is a great source of brassware as sometimes sells for buttons.

you can pump them all but I’d rather swap to a combi boiler personally.

Yeah, to clarify, it's gravity fed at the moment but I'm replacing the boiler (today) and switching to a combi so just wanted some confidence it will be good for a rainfall shower after, I guess the current one running off the bath taps should actually improve noticeably in the mean time to.

Your on a standard gravity fed system, no way you’ll get a rainfall shower to work properly unless you pump it.

We went from a combo boiler at our old place (on a shared supply with 5 other houses) and water pressure was painful at times (literally a trickle). Our latest house had a gravity fed system but we were recommended a mains pressure closed system (you *must* have decent mains pressure for this to work) and it is a revelation – we have two showers (both with rainfall heads) and they can be run together quite easily (along with various other taps, toilets, washing machines etc taking water). Yes the water pressure does drop but it just goes from being just about perfect to being still very manageable.

We also have a concealed cistern (which I still remain concerned about should it fail, but that's for another day) - it is ultra-slim so it fits inside a standard internal stud wall. We were told that the face plate can be removed to replace the ball cock but haven't needed to attempt to check if this is the case.

We got all our kit from our local plumbers' merchant - no more expensive than buying online and we also got some great advice from the person at the counter.

We have just finished doing our ensuite.

We have wetwall in the shower area.  Looks fabulous.  No more grout discolouration.  Super easy to clean.

Basins.  Get two taps.  One is madness.  Only for headbangers.

Never ever get a basin that sits on a unit.  Impossible to keep the unit under dry.

Tiling.  Get the best tiler you can find.  Good installation with joints set out properly makes all the difference.  Observe Banana's images above.  The tile joints are all over the place.  This would cause me sleepless nights.

Towel rails.  Get one which actually has gaps between the rails big enough to get a towel in.  Get round section bars, not square, much easier to put towels on.

Bit harsh... I thought the tiling looked pretty good on bananas pictures! Looks better than mine at any rate!

Re water feed, mine is direct thru Combi boiler with good pressure.

Also, if you are intending a large rainshower head, make sure your ceiling lighting is arranged so as the shower head doesn't cast a massive dark shadow. Probably not an issue in open bathrooms, but was in mine.

Basins.  Get two taps.  One is madness.  Only for headbangers

One thing I'm looking forward to is switching to a single tap basin, I hate having to quickly shift my hands between burning hot and freezing cold water when trying to get a handful of warm water to wash my face etc! I really can't see any advantage of two taps...

Fuzzywuzzy - are you not familiar with the cupped hands/ little bit of cold/ little bit of hot method?

The advantage of two taps is it removes all worries of banging your forehead.  This is quite a major advantage.

And the tiling isn't 'bad' in Bananas pictures - but you can see that some joins align and some don't because he has gone for two different tile sizes that do not marry up.  Also the use of regular and random tile bond in the same room is not recommended.

<span style="text-decoration: underline;">thats staggered bond the tiles are meant to be set out this way,it is the best effect .  the tiling job looks excellent </span>

OK so new boiler's in and working well so now finalising the bathroom stuff...

Are B&Q tiles really pants? I was looking at £40-50/m2 stuff in tileflair (can get a 20% discount there) but popped into B&Q more just to kill time and was amazed to see most of the tiles are £12-20/m2. Googling didn't really come back with anything apart from a several year old posts saying they were pants as you got a lot of variation in size and colour. Given the extra cost of stuff from 'normal' tile places it would be good for someone to confirm B&Q stuff should still be avoided...

Does anyone know of any thin (don't protrude off the wall much) towel rails? The radiator it's replacing (sort of, getting underfloor electric heating to) is right next to the toilet so I don't want to put it there but the only other spot is behind the bathroom door but there's only about 6.5cm there (before the door would hit it when open, although I'd have a stopper on the floor obviously). A lot seem to state 60-70mm protrusion but was hoping for something like 40-50mm to give a bit of margin. Or is that just a bad idea anyway? I was also thinking maybe run the underfloor heating up the wall behind the door instead (so towels on hooks on the door would press against the warmed wall when door was open...), again is that a stupid idea (I notice some electric underfloor heating makes specifically mention you can run it up walls to)?

Towel radiators kinda have to protrude as much as they do to fit the towels on - don't really know of any particularly   small ones in that way. Whatever you do, get a dual fuel radiator (ie, with electric element in it) so the radiator can be used in the summer months when the central heating is switched off.

I can't see underfloor heating running up a wall being particularly effective at dry towels but I guess it could work to a certain extent.

I would not buy tiles from B&Q.  Worth asking your tiler for recommendations.

2 of the most sensible things I've seen on STW in ages 😉

[i]if you have time and know what you’re looking for, eBay is a great source of brassware as sometimes sells for buttons.[/i]

+

[i]I’m not paying £400 for a mirrored cabinet with internal shaving socket when they’re on the Internet for under £200[/i]

Re B&Q tiles, tiler who did my bathroom above was complaining about B&Q tiles whilst doing my job. Was saying that customer supplied them for him to fit and some of them started cracking weeks/months later. Customer was trying to put the blame on him to get it fixed for free,  but he told the guy originally that they were poor tiles and kept suggesting he reconsider for better quality, so customer didn't really have an argument as tiler just said "I told you so". I Don't expect all their tiles cancbe poor quality, but I'd be inclined to go to a good indy and pay as much as you can afford, even if it's the Indy's basic range. For example, the plank effect tiles I bought were the cheapest North Tiles did in that style, I think it was to do with pattern repetition rather than lower quality, and he bulk bought them as his standard off the shelf plank effect tile.

I used Tile Giant for all my tiling needs- they offer a discount if you ask and buy enough stuff. Seemed in the ball park for most things generally and they offer a return service if you overbuy. It's best if you can actually plan out the tiling on graph paper as the general sq.m calculations can be way out. You could probably do it with the usual estimating formulas but the tile spacing going into corners etc. will look pants. I tried to keep cut tiles equal but then again I am really fussy.

Did mine not long ago.

Thing I'm pleased I did and would suggest? Left a hole in the wall to access shower pipes/back of controls (outside the cubicle) Hidden by mirror. Makes fixing things a doddle (like installing a pump when I realised pressure wasn't enough), no smashing through tiles to get to it.

Thing I should have done. Turns out there is a shower which uses mains cold pressure to drive a pump for gravity hot, no electric pump required. Really wish I'd known about this before i installed mine. You mentioned gravity fed, if you can get mains cold in there this is really worth thinking about. Too late for me but my next house will have it.

I went for screwfix/Victoria plumb/bathstore for modern looking stuff without the expense. All good.

28kW Ravenshit boiler - works fine with a rainfall shower head but I think I have decent pressure.

For showers, I put in a couple of Mira digital showers in my place. Gravity fed so the original showers were awful. Upshot of the digital ones is the gubbins all sits in the loft so plumbing is easy and should they fail, it's a 5 minute job to replace them. There's also no plumbing behind tiles which made installation easy and again removes potential future headaches

the thing I really love about them is how quickly they mix water to the perfect temperature - literally push the button and after it's purged the cold out boom - 39 degrees almost instantly

bookmark8ng for my next project...

Yeah I don't mind paying more for quality, just want to make sure I'm not paying 2-3x as much for tiles unnecessarily (a subsequent visit to Porcelanosa sort of convinced me £40-50/m2 maybe wasn't too crazy after all) :p

I'm now stuck on whether having matching lightish grey tiles on the floor and walls will look a bit too much like a prison cell... I'm surprised only a couple of the big tile places have room visualisers (and even then they seem pretty basic). I want an actual room scan done and VR facilities to view stuff!