Bathroom - where to buy

[Finlaggan]

We are moving to a new house in sept it will be a full renovation project. The family bathroom and shower room need replaced.

In the past I’ve bought a few items from Bathstore (wall hung pan, wash hand basin, shower head) and been fine with the quality and the price has obviously been good. I buy taps etc elsewhere.

Any recommendations where to purchase? I usually don’t source all from the one place so I’m happy to buy from various outlets. I do usually like to see before buying so I can see the style and quality. Thanks

Husband is a plumber and we've just done our forever home bathroom. All from Victoria plum

Our bath is huge and was in the sale from £1459 down to £318!!

Thanks I’ll take a look. This will be our forever home too, so I’m keen to get it right.

We went to an independent specialist (called Burge & Gunson in south London in case of use) and they were great. We said we wanted quality but weren't bothered about names and they gave us some really sound advice. We did two large bathrooms and a cloakroom for under £10k including a cast iron rolltop bath and separate Matki shower enclosures and we've been delighted with it all. We got to see it all and get a feel for the quality before we bought which was great. Our plumber raved over the quality. Perhaps there's somewhere similar near you?

Our bathroom and (creation of) en suite starts Tuesday. Our builder and plumber recommend Victoria Plum and I've got most of it from there with the odd piece from Bathstore and Soak. They highly recommend VP. The only thing they don't recommend from there are the more technical pieces, as opposed to aesthetic bits. For example, valves, wastes, traps etc they find to be of lesser quality (eg needing lots of extra work to make the threading secure etc). They've told me to leave those bits and they will source them.

We had a complete new bathroom a few years ago and went to a very expensive shop, recommended by our architect. They planned everything for us, made sure we weren't missing anything. After-care when things went wrong was excellent.

We are now coming to the end of the installation of another new shower room. This time, we couldn't afford to go back to the very expensive shop. Our architect told us what most people do is go to the posh shop to look and choose our bits. We then googled everything to find better prices, all-in-all, we saved over £1k doing this by sourcing from different suppliers online.

Feel slightly guilty about not supporting actual shops, but we just didn't have as much money this time and I suppose we are supporting online businesses instead

In my experience you can negotiate with the bricks and mortar shops if you're putting in a big order. It's tricky as obviously we all want to make savings, but if we don't support bricks and mortar shops we'll lose them and have nowhere to look at things in the flesh.