Tell me about BATHSTORE and bathroom products in general please!

[scampadoodle]

We're re-doing our bathroom, there's a Bathstore near us, & everything seems good quality & reasonably priced but I know nowt about these things - what are they like?

There seems to be a humungous gap between stuff in this price range & the 'named' brands. Is the more expensive stuff worth it?

Bumpity-bump

We had bathroom in our old house redone with Bathstore stuff - only time we've ever done it, so hard to compare, but we were really pleased - service was good, quality great, would happily use them again.

I thought Bathstore were supposed to be good - we are planning a new bathroom and I would have looked there without worrying about quality. Can you go and have a look at the 'named brands' in the flesh and the bathstore stuff to see if there's any difference? I would have thought that it's the quality of fittings like flush mechanisms, taps, pop up wastes, that you need to be careful with. The actual pottery can't be that different apart from its design? You could get the cheaper pottery and spend the money on 'quality' fittings perhaps? In the last place I did up, I did have a very plasticky toilet flush that subsequently kept sticking, so that is something I'm going to check this time around !

We had a new bathroom recently, used Bathstore stuff and a fitter they recommended, very very pleased with both.

prices don't include VAT and you have to pay for delivery as you're not allowed to pick up the stuff from the store
thats all I know sorry

Taps and fittings all great. Plumber who fitted it was also very impressed and wanted details of where we'd got it from so he could buy some himself...

Is that true? Have one at the end of my road, but would pissed off in the extreme if I had to pay for someting to be delivered that we could carry home. Not a bath, obviously

I think they only have display stuff in store - central warehouses, if I recall correctly. I guess that keeps the prices down.

yes, everything gets delivered from central warehouses. But I think the prices do include vat.

Thanks everyone, that's very helpful

I'm in the middle of a bathroom refit and have done a lot of research about this! Price-wise, bathstore is at the higher end imo. We've decided to get the things we really care about there. However, I have sourced a lot of very similar quality stuff at plumbcenter. Sorry, link not working at the mo but www.plumbcenter.co.uk (I think). They have a technical advice email support service, and the feedback I've read is good.
It all depends on how much you want to spend. We're still waiting on final plumber quotes, which will dictate how much we spend on "sanitary ware".
Can you tell I've thought a lot about this recently?

Oops, it's actually plumworld I was talking about.

you can collect stuff from the stores - it explains all in the brochures at the back

i think their stuff is pretty good and good value. im not sure it is the best quality in the world - eg one of our toilet cisterns from there has stopped working but that might happen with other makes too?

the shower is good though

Plumbworld, I meant. I'll get it right sometime.

There appears to be a number of Bathstore threads here and so I am 'covering all the bases' by posting this message on all of them. That way, anyone considering a Bathstore purchase should be given the chance to read about my views and experiences. I class myself as a very knowledgeable and competent DIY'er and have installed 7 bathrooms from scratch in my time. I set myself a high standard of workmanship and feel therefore I can speak from a position of a fair amount of experience.
The quality of Bathstore products is typical of the mass production methods they employ. The carcasses are melamine faced chipboard so are no different to many other suppliers. Therefore, when you look at their prices, they appear to me to offer poor value for money. After discount a typical cupboard carcass is over £100 which, when you consider what it's made of and the quality of the finish seems a lot.
Move on the the fascias and things only get worse. The one I have just installed on behalf of my daughter was the Portfolio range and a 600mm fascia pack (two small pieces of veneered/painted chipboard), after discount was £228; an absolute rip off in my opinion.
I suspect they really want you to use one of their approved fitters. Therefore beware if you are planning DIY or using an independent. The installation instructions are incomplete and fail to cover all of the processes required. There is no dedicated support team; instead you need to speak to the supplying store. In my experience, the two stores I used were staffed by teams who knew nothing about the installation process. If you're lucky, you might get to speak to one of their fitters if they are in the store at the time of your call. However, don't count on that solving any problems; the gent I spoke to seemed to know very little and gave the impression that he wasn't to happy to help 'an amateur' anyway.
To sum up, in my opinion, Bathstore initially impress with their showroom displays but drill a little deeper and they seem to offer very poor value for money and are not 'tooled up' to give quick support during independent installation. So, shop around and you will almost certainly find something better.