Bathroom Recommendations

[OtiMama]

We moved into our new house and quite quickly it's become apparent we need to bite the bullet and get the whole room gutted and replaced.

Feeling stressed about the money so would love to hear everyone's recommendations for things they love and things they would suggest avoiding! It's a shower room bathroom.

Like shower panels V tiles. What flooring? Storage?

Thanks for any advice and if anyone is willing to share how much they paid that would be appreciated. I think ours will be more as we need new floorboards underneath due to a loo leak. Plus plastering/new lighting on the ceiling too.

We paid just over £10k for a bathroom with a shower, no bath and re plastered full all walls Porcelanosa tiles
. This is in the south east. We only went high end on the tiles. Also LVT flooring from a local shop.

This was 4 years ago.

I prefer the LVT floor we put in to the tiles in the ensuite we haven't changed.

I still much prefer large format tiles to shower panels.

Much easier to change wall paint than tiles - so I'd go neutral on the big stuff and personalize with accessories and wall paint.

Not too much storage - bathrooms aren't the idea conditions for storage. We have a cupboard under the sink - new shampoo, spare loo roll, sanitary stuff. That's all that is needed imo.

I'm not sure how much the total cost was as we had a new shower room as part of a bigger job, but I've had both shower panels and tiles, and I think both are fine. The wetwall panels are more expensive to buy than tiles (depending on your taste) but cheaper to fit, so they can sometimes work out cheaper overall. The ones with the matt finish can look quite nice. We have one that is matt and kind of textured, and I quite like it.

I also found a complete toilet, sink, vanity unit & countertop in Bathroom City (online) for a good price, and our plumber said it was cheaper to do that than order bits through the local builders' merchant even with his discount, so it's worth having a look online. We were wanting to put the toilet next to the sink so we just measured the space along the back wall and bought the complete unit that would fit.

We had a long slow bath leak through the floorboards, and 2 large bath leaks flooding through the floor cavity and flooded the kitchen below, and also a separate and unknown shower leak for probably about 5 years at least. We had it all ripped out and taken back to brick but didn't need all new floor boards or joists though so don't assume you do.

We had an outrageous ridiculous quote from Wickes that didn't include fitting and the quality or design didn't seem that great either.

We ended up designing ourselves and ordering online from Drench.com after checking out the brands in our local builders merchants/DIY stores first. It was part of a whole house project so can't comment on absolute cost although spent about 7.5k for double ended bath with filler and follow-me shower head, rainforest shower with hand held shower head on a slider, rimless toilet, massive towel-radiator, and floating sink with drawers and an anti-fog storage mirror. We got a carpenter to fill in the nooks with a giant storage cupboard for towels and cleaning stuff, spare loo rolls, our scales and toddler step. We had it tiled half-height which I love - easy to repaint the top half when we want a freshen up. However we chose small tiles which are a pain to clean.

If I was doing it again, I'd probably not bother with the rainforest shower (I never use it - not great for hair washing imo, I think DH uses it occasionally though), I'd put in UFH and choose bigger tiles.

Had ours done last year, in the SE.

Thanks everyone, some really helpful comments here!

This summer we had our bathroom completely redone. From bath to quadrant shower, new floorboards, tiled floor to ceiling. Furnishings all wall hung.
Out bathroom fitter quoted £4,200 + extra for pipe work floor boards, lighting, extractor etc which came to about £750.
we sourced the shower , shower cubicle, toilet, vanity unit and cupboard from Plumbworld. Would highly recommend them everything arrived promptly and very well packaged. The total for them was around £1500. Our guy was very impressed. Tiles for our small room were £1100.
our quotes ranged from £3,500 - £12,500. All quotes excludes fixtures.
It was very important that whoever did the bathroom did what I wanted. My guy said anything is possible but sometimes it might cost a little more.

One regret is we probably should have hard underfloor heating. Tiles are cold to the feet.
Good luck.