bathroom suite cost & electric rewiring mess :(

[cupcakesarelife]

Hi all, two questions:

1. how much is a new modern toilet, bathtub and sink? Just adding up costs for the suite only and having them fitted in. This is assuming no re-plumbing needing and problems with plumbing and additional costs.
   I am redoing the rest of my bathroom myself as a DIY project - i.e. the tiling and flooring. When I say tiling, I mean painting it, and flooring will have new funky lino on it. I am just refreshing it really but the toilet, bathtub and sink need to be replaced.

2. we need to rewire our new house - it's not done for 30 years, the electrician said it needs an upgrade for safety etc. The house is 1100 sq feet. Attached is the floor plan in case that helps.

We don't have any money to do up the house right now (probably have to wait 1-2 years), but the house can be lived in, it's functional although quite dated. Yet, I know the re-wiring will involve breaking into the wall and then re-plastering.

Ideally I want to renovate with the re-wiring so it costs less overall, but it's just not possible. i have to prioritise safety in the house for now.

My (stupid) question about the re-wiring is: after the electrician has re-plastered, can I paint over it straight away? What needs to happen to a re-plastered wall to prep it for painting? sorry for this question, I'm still learning!

thanks!

Electrician won't re-plaster a wall - they're not plasterers!

Once you've got new plaster you need a mist-coat and then paint. When we re-plastered we had 3 coats of paint

Unlikely that it needs a rewire after only 30 years. The safety specs for electrics haven't changed that much. I would get a quote from a different electrician and see how much it will cost to have all the circuits checked and the switchboard and consumer unit updates to modern standards.

If the electrics were dangerous, the circuits would keep tripping out all the time.

Obviously if you think the previous owner has done their own wiring then it might be a bit more dodgy and worth replacing.

There’s a big difference between electrics not meeting the current specifications and then actually being unsafe.

For bathroom stuff, it depends what sort of thing you want. If you shop around and only want cheap stuff then you could get a new sink, loo, bath plus taps for both for about £700-1000. Installation will be a plumber for 3-5 days if there are no issues so maybe £1000-£1500?

The electrician will just patch the bits they cut out, so it will still be pretty noticeable. You can just paint it as @kirinm says, mistcoat and then a couple of coats of colour.

The electrician says upgrade rather than rewire in the original post so I assume that the actual wiring is ok? Maybe not though?

You can price up your bathroom suite quite easily on Victorian Plumbing or similar.

@Geneticsbunny is there a difference between upgrade and re-wiring? As soon as he mentioned the word "safety", I just zoned out and imagined an accident/injury/death occurring in the house. It's really freaked me out.

Do you or anyone else mind explaining briefly the difference and the type of work that's involved?

@Geneticsbunny also thanks for the bathroom costs. is it 1000-1500 for the parts and labour costs, or it's 1000-1500 on top of the parts?

@sweetpickle2 thank you! I'll try victoria plumbing. I want one of those old style bathtubs - pic attached. The bathroom is kinda big enough with space to move for a bathtub, loo and sink, but not a shower. I'm not sure how to "design" the bathtub to have a proper shower with it. I think an electric shower will look off against the "traditional" look of the bathtub. The look I'm going for is victorian/english countryside feel.

The electrical upgrade is probably just consumer box with fuses and surge protection and maybe some sockets. So likely £500-£1000 total. Some of the cost of this is the paperwork for building control.

we need to rewire our new house - it's not done for 30 years, the electrician said it needs an upgrade for safety etc.

What's wrong with the current wiring, have you been told there are safety issues? Our house is 50 years old and has never been rewired, there is no need.

On the bathroom, it looks like you have others, so I would do the rip out and rubbish disposal yourself. You can check walls and floors are sound - its common for shower leaks to affect these if they haven't been done properly before or been leaking.

@Ilovemyshed yep, there's two bathrooms.

I'm concentrating on one bathroom first so we have a "modern" one that we can use. We figured we should just "do up" the rooms we need (equivalent to a one bed flat so we can function there) and do the rest of the house slowly.

The bathroom with the shower has outdated 1970s style loo lol. The other one with bathtub is a bit more modern but needs need 3 piece suite. We don't want to use the outdated one and thinking about just throwing out that loo, sink and shower for now.

On another note, I'm actually thinking about making the bathroom with shower into a study/small gym connected to the bedroom opposite (for my partner). And having a second bathroom downstairs where the study is.

Basically, from your fuseboard there are different power circuits and lighting circuits, cooker circuit (higher rated fuse) and so on. These are wired into each fused section of the board and wires run round all the (for example) lights upstairs, lights downstairs, power upstairs, power downstairs, kitchen ring main and lighting, cooker circuit and so on with sockets or switched lights coming off each circuit.

From the fuseboard (aka consumer board ) it goes back to your meter and from there the house fuse from the main power into the house ( electricity supplier side of meter).

What is probably required is a new consumer board that has modern fuses, a check on the load from each circuit and a check on every light and socket to make sure its all working correctly and not overloading any one circuit. You may need some lights changing from halogen to led which draw less power.

For example years ago the you might have a 45 amp fuse on a circuit which needs only 30 amp. If the fuse is too highly rated is won't blow if there is an issue and thats when it burns instead. A faulty piece of equipment or a missing earth can cause issues and the fuse is the failsafe.

Also if you get a power surge for any reason, it can arc across the fuse and cause issue, which is why surge protection is required under new building regs now.

Ask your sparky to tell you.

Another vote for getting clarity on what’s required with electrics. We had wiring that needed an upgrade, they didn’t physically rewire but upgraded the circuitry, added circuitry and swapped some stuff over etc. Cost a bit but nothing like physical rewiring.

Good luck with it all!

@cupcakesarelife that was just labour.

Don’t move the bathroom downstairs - no buyer would ever prefer that over an en suite. The study can be used as a gym though, and easier to get the equipment in on the ground floor.

@Mirabai oh I meant a second bathroom downstairs, and keep one upstairs. They are a lot smaller when you see them in person. The floor plan makes them look bigger.

but i do think maybe an ensuite would be best. We’ll probably decide over the next year anyway

@HoppingPavlova thanks for sharing the work you had done. Yes, agreed. Need to understand what the electrician meant. I just assumed rewiring like leaving holes in the walls etc but seems this may or may not be the case now!

@Ilovemyshed appreciate your explanation so much!! I’ll ask the sparky haha

If you’re worried about safety then you can get an EICR done relatively cheaply. £100 ish depending on part of the country. I’d put good money on it being as above - consumer unit needs and upgrade to put RCBO switches in. Doesn’t mean it’s unsafe, just means that the unit is old and could be upgraded. We had ours done a couple of years back £2500 from memory (London), but did include new fuses too and an extra 2 x circuits added for an oven and then the garden room. Think the board work itself was about £1600 and two days work for the sparky.

Yes definitely look into what is needed and the cost. We have moved into an Edwardian semi that was very 70s inside. The consumer unit was ok and we had various bits of wiring upgraded plus all over the house plus we moved the kitchen so needed new circuits in there plus had a car charger. Whole lot was about 2.7k but that was a fair bit of work and a new cooker circuit, kitchen switches circuit and some hefty cables for the car charger and it is a fairly substantial house with quite a few rooms.

A few holes as we had the light switches chased in but nothing that filler didnt sort. If you do need plastering any where in the future get Screwfix new plaster paint as you can use it straight out of the pot and has decent coverage. Get a bad of Gyproc Easifill 60 then make up what you need and you can do it to the consistency you want ie. thicker for large holes.

As well as looking online for bathroom stuff have a look at places like Facebook Marketplace, there’s currently a bath similar to the one in your picture for £180 near me at the moment.

Our walls were trashed by full rewired. It was last down when house built 80+ years ago though. So there was hardly any conduits in all to pull wires through, so had to channel out. And they added lots more plug sockets as most rooms only had 1. The rooms had to be completely emptied and it was full on building site dust. Around €14,000! That included new mains unit and rewiring, sockets and some lighting added. Plastering was separate, electricians only filled in holes, and we had a friend plaster at ‘mates rates’ which was about €3000 (but that was full re plaster of 4 rooms as so many rewire holes and skim and tidy of 4 rooms including double height hallway)

So definitely check what they mean. As one is probably £1-2000, they other £££

If you put one of the bathrooms downstairs, you will knock thousands off the value. Really, really, really DON'T do this.

This is an example of full rewiring if they need to add new light or plug socket points. The channels in walls are jack hammered out of solid walls so you can imagine the mess. Think we filled a skip with the chiselled out brick.
Obviously you have more or less depending on if you already have enough plugs. If nothing moved and no extras it will be quicker