Renovating en suite shower cost

[MyrtleLion]

We want to completely renovate the ensuite. 1.85m x 1.8m. New shower, toilet, sink, radiator and cupboards. New floor, new walls, new ceiling and lights and new extractor fan.

Our plumber said we should buy everything and he'll fit it in two weeks.

How much should we be paying for labour and roughly how much for the products?

Is it cheaper to get a plumber who will buy the products and fit?
Is it worth getting a bathroom designer? or will they be way more expensive?
We don't want bottom of the range products but we don't want to spend a fortune either.

I feel at a loss.

I did it via a company who let me choose stuff from catalogues

It would have been about £500 cheaper buying everything myself separately, but it was invaluable having them manage the timings, deliveries, fitting and any issues with damages (had a couple!)

Total cost £8k and took about a week once stuff had arrived

Watching out of interest. I need a new ensuite!! X

We did it for about 6-7k all in, but that won't include new walls, plastering, new ceilings, electrics/lighting, radiator as that was all renewed before in full house Reno. I would imagine this would be around 10k. We chose our fittings and individually hired the trades, in our case just tiler and plumber. We had electrician fully rewire the house and plumber install full central heating, some builders do the walls and ceilings.

We are doing it ourselves, I haven't kept a log of costs and it's been ongoing for A LONG TIME.

I was quoted around £8k for a bog standard refit about 18m ago. It is probably going to come out about half that, and be exactly what I want.

It is 1.2m x 2.7m

Is the plumber a avalibale in 2 weeks? That is a major red flag. It’s 6 to 9 month wait in our area.

I would have said 5-10k depending on:
fixtures andfittings
Whether you are moving things about

I had the bath taken out of my ensuite and a large double shower including shower tray and thick glass panel put in its place with green aqua boards on all walls around the shower and aqua panels over the top and over the entire room, new basin, tap, toilet and fan nonslip floor covering and towel rail radiator, white paneled ceiling with spotlights. £6200 including labour. My plumber gives me a very good deal because I used him a lot as I have 11 btl he does all plumbing work for me and some odd maintenance job too. This was almost 2 years ago. He also refitted my main bathroom also with aqua green panels around bath and aqua boards on top about a month later £5700, also my top floor shower room refit £2700 and downstairs cloakroom £700. I got all my bathrooms done in about a 4 month period. This year my focus is on getting my bedroom and 2 guest rooms done.

I got a designer out, quoted 11k and that's them walking in, completely ripping out, ceiling, walls, rerouting pipes (200yr old house with a botched renovation about 30yrs ago. Room is approx 6ft x 10 ft. Taking away everything.

New bath, walk in shower, toilet, sink/vanity, heated towel rail, wet room walls, spot lights etc. I'm so glad to see my quote isn't actually absurd!

My plumber insisted there was no need to use hardiback all around the bath and the whole room, he only did it on the side which was not a solid wall, where shower pipes were installed above the bath.
That's a really good price (I'm assuming including fixtures and fittings and all building materials). We are in London so prices seem to be higher, we probably would be paying 10k for that work, if new plasterboard ceiling and spotlights and radiators were included. Maybe even 12k.

It depends—are you just replacing the old fittings with new ones, or are you moving pipework around too?
If there's no pipework being moved, one plumber should be able to handle the entire job and a general handyman can probably do tiling.

I went to a local bathroom supplier for ideas and he was very helpful. Then he rang some contacts and put me in touch with a recommended plumber/joiner who came and showed me examples of his work and discussed my design. As he'd got a postponed job due to late delivery of tiles from Italy, he was able to do mine the next week. So it was good timing! The chap was very good, tidy and efficient. But it was a 2 day job, ripping out bath, large walk in shower installed, thick shower screen, grab rail and tiling. Was £1900.

No, we booked him in August to do it in March.

It will take two weeks.

Everything is staying in place with new shower, toilet, sink. Mostly adding cupboards and replacing tiles with boards. We spent two hours trying to fit the shower where the sink is now, but we couldn't make it fit.

I'm concerned that when we take the tiles off the shower wall it will be black mould underneath as it keeps coming through. We think we'll have to wait a couple of weeks while it dries out. The extractor fan is broken and there are no windows.

@Lemonbalm8, yes he always gives me a great price because I give him quite a bit of work. He's a perfectionist and really reliable too. I'm lucky to have him. Last week in January he's coming to make me a laundry room in the top part of the garage.

Did he not give you a quote when you booked him? I would expext to pay near 5k for labour, including electrics and replastering.

He said £6k but we didn't get a written quote. When we priced up the products it doubled the cost, hence my post. It seems very expensive to spend £12k+ on such a small room.

6k is just labour? I don't think it's far off for new ceilings, walls, plastering, rads and electrics. And yes good materials will be roughly 5-6k. You may want to also leave some 1.5k for contingency.
Ours is also small and we paid less just because we'd already done half of the work you mentioned before.

@MyrtleLion smaller doesn't mean easier. Our tiny cloakroom (with just toilet and basin) surprisingly cost not too far off from our ensuite. Tiling has been expensive for us, make sure the quality is good, lots of bad bathroom installers out there charging 10-15k.

We're not tiling, we're going to have wall panels which are cheaper. Maybe his labour will be cheaper if we don't tile.

I'm thinking of getting a bathroom designer and installer. There's one nearby. If I'm going to spend £12k I want it to look fucking amazing.

Yes you might as well tile if you're spending 10-12k. The floor tiles are a little bit colder than I hoped but it is winter.

I don't want to tile because the mould creeps through. The panels look great. I could get them in a tile pattern where the grout would never discolour, but I want to embrace the complete panelness of it.

I didn't have tiles in any of my new bathrooms/ensuite/shower room. The grout always looks grubby after a while and I'm not the sort who scrubs grout with an old toothbrush. I just went for the large coloured aqua panels with chrome bits in corners. We got all of the plumbing supplies for ours from Clifton Trade Bathrooms. They have branches around the place but they give our plumber a good discount due to amount of their supplies he buys and he passed half of the discount on to us which we thought was very fair. They do various ranges from budget to luxury. You can get the panels in other places too. My sister has had them for almost 10 years and her bathroom still looks pristine, like it's just been done. Also it's quicker to put up than tiles so less labour intense which actually saves money.

Slightly different, we're about to have a new bathroom - £6700 including toilet, vanity unit, bath, making good under existing tiles with moisture board, tiles, tiling, filling in cracks on ceiling, flooring and painting. Our lights and extractor fan are fine for us.

We were originally going with Wickes, but had an awful lot of messing around. They quoted £6300, but weren't doing any painting, so £6-7k seems to be going rate for us. Designer company quoted £10k.

@MyrtleLion
I would make an extractor fan a priority - you can buy them really cheaply in somewhere like screwfix/wickes otherwise the mould problem will come back.

That sounds like a fairly straightforward job labour-wise, especially since there’s no pipework involved if all the taps and toilet flushes are staying in the same place. Don’t let them charge you for more than 4 days of work if it’s a straight swap.

If I were you, I’d aim to keep the total cost around £5k-6.5k, which I think is very doable. Here’s a rough breakdown:

• Plumber (4 days max): £1000–£1500
• Tiler/handyman (3 days): £600
• Suite:
• Toilet: ~£150
• Bath: ~£300
• Taps: ~£300
• Countertop sink: ~£100
• Furniture for countertop sink - £300
• Total for suite: ~£1150
• Seperate Shower or shower in bath: ???
• Tiles: Cost per square metre depends on what you choose, but shop around for bargains.

Hope that helps! 😊

Unless you live in an area where labour is very scarce and hard to source - I've noticed rural places are tricky