Bathroom refit - advice needed please!

[janegrey]

We're going to refit our bathroom, and have started looking at suites, tiles, showers etc.

Can anyone advise on how much difference there is between the kind of high-level suites, shower trays etc that you'd buy from an independent bathroom company and somewhere like B&Q or Wickes?

For instance, we're replacing the bath with a big shower and the plastic shower tray we saw at the independent place was about £400.

But dh reckons B&Q do a similar one for about £180. Neither of us knows if the quality would be significantly different.

Anyone out there in the business? How can we compare like-with-like?

Or has anyone done the same sort of thing recently and can offer tips?

Tia

We bought our shower tray from here. I thought the ones in B&Q were really plasticy and felt like your foot was going to go through it, whereas this one is really solid and heavy.

I thought B&Q were really expensive compared to places like bathstore.

We bought our suite in the sale in Homebase and they took 3 months to deliver it, so we are currently mid fitting and I am a week overdue with DC2, which I'm not overly happy about. Plus bits were missing and other bits didn't fit and Homebase were really crap about sorting it out. I plan to complain when I get the chance.