Bathroom planning/design service

[Flyonthewindscreen]

We are planning a much needed new bathroom and are wondering about using the free design service offered by various stores such as Homebase. Had anyone used one and if so which one and would you recommend. Or not bother? The bathroom is small and I can't see what drastic changes in layout could be made, although I would like to change to a corner bath.

We've just started doing the same. The first thing to bear in mind is that the designs aren't generic, they're based on specific products that store has (although you could do the legwork to source alternatives yourself), so you need to consider the reputation of the store in general, not just the recommendation of their design service. Anyway, our thoughts so far:

• Wickes - The design appointment was pretty thorough - they thought of a lot of things we hadn't considered and had some good suggestions of how to make what we wanted work with the room. The downside is that they seem to be massively overpriced (even with the 60% winter discount included in our quote!) E.g. they want a 3 figure sum for the shower bath (fine), but then the same amount again for the glass screen, plus another £100-£200 on top for the side panel. Whereas I've seen identical shower baths on a number of bathroom supply websites where all of the above is included for the price of the Wickes bath alone.

• B&Q - Avoid, avoid, avoid. Although their website has lots of different brands, if you go into their showrooms it's nothing but their own brand stuff (Cooke and Lewis), which is apparently poor quality. Also horror stories abound about their installations!

• Homebase - Not had an appointment with them yet, but got one booked so I'll let you know!

In addition to the big 3 above, we're also looking at local independent bathroom showrooms and contacting bathroom fitters found on Checkatrade, as I hear some will help you with the design and sourcing fixtures. Will keep you posted.

Great thanks, very helpful. Interesting that B&Q a no as that was one I was considering.

I found Bathstore really helpful and they have an online app you can use to plan a bathroom yourself. We didn't buy from them in the end (too many horror stories on here tbh about the quality). Most of our newish bathroom fittings came from the fitter's plumbers' merchants, but we bought the bath from B&Q and the taps from a online retailer.

Have a look around Pinterest and Google as well for bathroom layout ideas/plans etc if your bathroom isn't strangely shaped. I often find that there are similarly proportioned rooms to ours with layouts already mapped out - which is a good starting point.

Also, do bear in mind that if you change about the positioning of your suite it will cost a lot more in labour as its not a straight swap.

I also found bathstore had a really good design service. We have just bought the bath and a radiator from them. Not sure if we will buy anything else from them yet as we are sourcing bit by bit

We used Wickes and found them excellent. We had our very large bathroom completely overhauled and they had great ideas. We also used their fitters and they were great.

Update as promised...

Bathroom fitters from Checkatrade - Got nowhere with this - contacted 2, both with very good rankings - one never replied, the other replied asking when they could come to discuss it further, I replied with a list of suitable dates and times and then never heard anything more

Independent bathroom showrooms - Again, went for 2 - one was a family-based business; they seemed very nice but we established quickly that they were way outside our budget, so that was the end of that. The other, we looked around the showroom and went to the desk to make a design appointment but were stood there (ignored) for so long that we gave up and left!

Homebase - Very similar to our experience at Wickes, but better! Even more thorough - right down to the types of plugs. Their total quote was close to Wickes (fixtures were a little less, labour was a little more), but it was more comprehensive - for example, Wickes included the cost of tiling but not the tiles - they said we'd have to source those ourselves and gave us a rough idea of the total cost; whereas Homebase took us over to the tile section to pick there and then. We also felt Homebase were giving us better value - I won't go into all the examples but just one: we're having 3 bathrooms done at once and were expecting some of the labour overheads to be reduced because of that - no problem at Homebase, but with Wickes it was a case of "Computer says no"

So we're going with Homebase!