Bathroom refurbishment SE

[zaffa]

Help!
We have a tiny budget and need a new bathroom so I'm after help and ideas if possible.
We have a fully tiled bathroom, 2.2m x 2m. It has an old airing cupboard in.
Room is fully tiled, floors and walls. Only paint on ceilings.
Prone to mould despite the extractor fan.
Plan is to remove old wiring cupboard and all tiles so we know walls and ceilings will need skimming, new p shaped bath, loo and sink units and all the storage we can cram in.
Will tile shower / bath area and paint the rest.
We have a quote pending with wickes but how can we keep costs down? Is it cheaper to arrange people to come in ourselves or does that add so much time / disorganisation that it's better to pay for it all in one go?
We will need to borrow the money, hoping for 0% interest deal so will probably have to go with a main installer / bathroom seller anyway.
Has anyone had anything similar done recently and gotten it all in for close to £6k or am I deluded?

Wickes were awful for us and our quote for fixtures with them alone (without the cost of fitting) was already more than 6k!

We found a builder to oversee first then ordered all fittings from Drench.com and Victorian Plumbing online ourselves with advice from plumber. The plumber (part of builder team) had a trade discount with Victorian Plumbing and also a local tile merchants so we saved there.

We were also having other work done around the house by the building team too so they gave us a cheaper price than doing all the jobs individually and separately or room by room. Also SE based.

I agree. Find a bathroom installer first and then buy the new fittings and fixtures. They can often suggest trade places to buy from. Warehouse type places rather than fancy bathroom showrooms.

It's cheaper if you don't move anything (sinks and toilets).

Did roughly this plus moving a loo in South London in 2021 for £5k all in. Local builder, suite bought off an online retailer.

I would not get Wicks to do it, you can project manage yourselves quite easily. A good 'handy man' might even be able to do all the trades, they do exist. If I was you I would post the job on mybuilder.com or ratedpeople.com along with the dimensions of the bathroom, floorplan if you have one, photos of the existing bathroom will make it a better brief. Do you want to swap out what's there or do you want to change the layout?

Decide on the rough design/layout youselves. Maybe start with the sink and work around it from there? What is a P shaped bath?

If you source all the materials yourself, it'll be much cheaper like the other poster said. Victorianplumbing have decent stuff, topps tiles are good too. The actual 'suites' are inexpensive. Bath -£250, sink £50, toilet - £150. The expensive bits are the taps and things like under sink vanity cabinets, which, you can probably source on ebay much cheaper

Thank you everyone.
We need the cupboard knocked out which will mean walls and ceiling re plastered - and the bath will move up a bit but be on the same wall.
We toyed with the idea of moving the sink and loo around - same wall but swapping positions, but honestly if it's really expensive to do we probably won't bother.
We do want a lot of built in storage. I'd like to cram as much in there as possible and to have all the stuff 'hidden' so the more the better really.
Thanks everyone for your ideas. We have our first app with the wickes guy who came out to measure on Saturday, so will no doubt be shocked at the price and then start thinking about how we can do it cheaper - we wanted a rough idea of costs first.
Once we have a better idea of exactly what we want and what we will compromise on, I think I'll definitely take the advice to post on the local 'my builder' site. I don't want to wait too long, and keep hearing about how much costs keep going up!

It's one of those with the extra bit on one end for the shower - the room is pretty small and to squeeze in a stand-alone shower would cut into the storage space too much so would rather go with one over the bath.
We had one in a previous house and we loved it, but I guess like everything it's not really a deal breaker. I am keen for a bigger double ended one, so that's actually more important to us than the shower bit I think

Oh ok yes I know what you mean. Good luck!

Top tip! If going for double ended bath, I highly recommend finding one with the drainer off centre so it's not directly under your bum when you try and relax in the bath 😂

Thank you! I think there's been some good advice here, and I think we probably know that it will be cheaper to organise etc ourselves and bring in the various trades like Floorer / do the painting ourselves, we are a bit nervous about what we will find under all that tiling (it's an old 1930s bathroom, we are fairly certain the bathroom has been there for 30 years plus and the floor has a couple of cracked tiles and we've just seen some cracked grouting at the shower end of the bath, and we are used to uncovering suspicious DIY fixes whenever we try to do anything!). So we are tempted by the idea of one company doing it all and guaranteeing the work, but I guess a good fitter will know people to bring in if something goes wrong / all the plaster gets pulled off with the tiles etc!

Haha yes, in our old house we had an L shaped one with the taps in the middle, but the drainer up one end and it was the only down side!!

We're looking at doing the bathroom in our new house if it all goes through. We were told that it costs a lot more to move toilets because of the waste pipes but moving sinks were cheap and easy.

Thanks. I hung out the window to get a good look at the soil pipe arrangement outside and my proposal is to move the loo to directly in front of the soil pipe, currently it's to the side and there is about two foot of soil pipe connecting it (same wall). Possibly a rubbish description, but also really irritating because I can see absolutely no benefit to why they have installed it where they have instead of actually in front of the soil pipe (and therefor not right next to the door). Having said that, it doesn't look like a hole has been filled so possibly it was like that back when they built it? (Or they've rendered over the hole, but my assumption was that the house was rendered when built)

To update for anyone who finds this thread in the future and wants an idea of price, wickes quoted £8k for supply and fit, excluding plastering and the cost of the tiles and flooring.

Have you decided if you're going to use them?

We don't know yet. The price is less than we expected but there are some limitations with their items (I can't find doors I like for their unit) but I am tempted for the ease and the finance options

If you are near Croydon there is a trade bathroom place round the back of purley way. They have a ton of brochures and prices are discounted from the brochure price. I paid about 2k for freestanding bath and taps, sink with cupboard, separate freestanding cupboard and toilet. Plus all bits and pieces to make them work. Could have got cheaper bits.

There are also some decent not too expensive tile places tucked away in same bit.

I paid about 7k all in I think including fitting, paint, tiles, flooring etc.

So after sleeping on it, I'm not going with the current plan. We aren't enamoured with the design or the door options for the unit. We are a bit stuck on design really - I dont feel like this design really maximises storage, but the designer seemed to have a lot of reasons why he couldn't change bits but it mostly seemed to come down to not selling the combos we were proposing.
So back to the drawing board!

Thanks - we are in Hampshire so it's not too far, but are going to try a couple of local places first I think