Hey friends,

Thank you for the well wishes. As it happened, on the day we wed, the Queen died. Not a great omen. On the upside though, should I forget, I can easily look up the date of our anniversary.

I think if you pitched the idea of a monarchy in 2022 there wouldn't be many takers so the fact that there are so few questioning it demonstrates how great she was in the role. She'll be missed 👑.

💭 Bathroom Reflections

Good, cheap and fast. That's what we all want from our renovation projects. But whether you are DIYing or paying professionals you can only have two.

I think this bathroom is good - good materials, good construction and it looks good. Whether it was cheap we'll look at later...but it certainly wasn't fast. A while back a reader, Michael, emailed me offering words of encouragement that with so many disciplines involved bathrooms are the hardest of all rooms. And that's absolutely correct - it's taken 6 months from start to finish.

Here are some lessons and reflections, in no particular order:

• Layout - Having played around with many options I think I got this right. Walking in you have the sink right in front of you and bath/shower to the right. The loo area almost feels separate and a bit hidden. A walk-in shower beats a shower-over-bath hands down and if this was to be our one and only bathroom I may have tried to squeeze one in together with a bath. As we'll have others I think making it feel spacious was the right call. Here are some other layouts I considered:

• Concealed cistern - I might be insulting some of your bathrooms here but I think having a protruding stand alone box for a concealed cistern toilet looks odd. I can't see the point; just go with a close coupled toilet. However, if it's installed within studs that go right across a wall they look excellent. I extended the stud wall right across and used the extra space to install a useful storage cupboard. Because of the window above I stopped this wall short which gave me a shelf upon which sits a bird of paradise plant. I've wanted one for a while but it's too big for anywhere else in the house. Here, lifted off the floor, the leaves stretch out above head height which is perfect. It's also reflected in the mirror when you walk in to the bathroom.

• Bath - 1800mm length is great for me. Less so for Abi as she slips down so she's using a bath matt for friction. The 800mm width is a good alternative to L-shaped or P-shaped shower baths. Very happy with the quality.
• LED strips - I feared these might look a bit naff or might go unused. But no, they make the bathroom IMO. So far my favourite setting is to have the downlights at their dimmest and the strips at their brightest for a relaxing ambience (bubble bath vibes). As long as you can solder, they are an easy and pretty cheap addition that looks high end.
• Tiling all the walls - I thought it might feel closed in or overbearing but I really like it. It's robust as well, the boy can splash about as much as he likes without damaging any paintwork.
• Mirror cabinet - Probably my biggest regret. I think it would have been much better if it had stuck out an inch or so, rather than flush with the tiles. That way I could have had a 90 degree to create a seal and it would have looked neater. Embedding was a good idea but tricky to remove in future.
• The niche above the sink - this is excellent. It only came to me because I realised I needed a gap under the mirror to activate the sensor for the lights but it's great for keeping the sink clear of toothbrushes and soap. Not that common either. Maybe I'll set a trend.
• Tile style - Many of you seem to really like the herringbone. As do I but I'm more taken with the large format porcelain. They're also slip resistant (R10 rating). I've had polished porcelain on a bathroom floor before and it's slippy when wet so defo look at the R rating when buying. I appreciate the bathroom won't be to everyone's taste but it's neutral and I think it will resist becoming dated quickly. We don't live in a period property so going modern felt right for a bathroom. I doubt we'll do the kitchen the same though, probably shaker style rather than glossy.
• Shower niches - Well worth putting in BUT there are two issues. 1. To get our products we have to reach through the shower or turn it off first. 2. The bottom two niches get pretty wet and a problem a number of you have in your own is that they get grubby quickly. The slope I put on them does allow them to drain but some water still sits on top due to water tension. Conclusion - situate your niches away from the shower if you can. Unfortunately there was no way I could as this was the only stud wall.
• Black fittings - I like black a lot but I was acutely aware that living in a hard water area means limescale which will show up more against black. Abi was insistent though. It's on trend but unlike the tiles, these can be changed easily enough with the times. We may consider adding a water softener to our house in future though.
• Shower valve - This is great. The push start is a nice feature and it's neat looking too. In the house with the garden room the shower valve cartridges are failing and we can't get replacements so my mum is about to spend nearly £1k on having a new one fitted and will have to make a feature of new non-matching tiling around it. Cheap, non branded shower valves are a false economy I reckon.
• Wall-hung fixtures (sink, towel rail, loo) - I really like this aspect; easy to get a mop under, there are no nooks to get dusty and I think they make the room feel bigger. Would recommend.
• Extractor - The 'Silent Tornado' is definitely not silent but pretty powerful. Content with the choice.
• Items I haven't been impressed with - The Grohe toilet and cistern. There were a lot of little things during installation where I thought - 'this is badly designed'. I might try Gerebit next time. Another one was the Genesis tile trims. They market themselves as a premium brand but I thought the quality was low as they scuffed very easily. Let's not forget the buzzing cabinet either. Brands I liked: Marmox, Carron, Shluter, Crosswater, Ardex and Spax screws!
• The windows - Because I've tiled around the window recesses, removing them will probably have to be done from the outside which means taking off the pebbledash. Ideally we'd have replaced all the windows when we moved in but there were (and are) more pressing needs. Something to bear in mind.
• Hand shower - Good for cleaning the bath and for women who don't always want to get their hair wet. I've noticed that there can be a big difference in how quickly one's hair dries - something to do with hair porosity I believe. Anyway, a hand shower is essential. We did look at deck-mounted shower but I read the retractable hose can stop retracting after a while and a reader told me his kids liked to pour water down the hole of theirs. I think a wall mounted one was the right decision, even if it isn't the best for aesthetics.
• Plumbing - As you'll see, paying for a plumber was a considerable portion of the cost. I like him, we get on well and with so much else to learn, not having to worry about the plumbing was helpful. But it looks pretty easy right? Plastic pipes that screw into each other, a bit of PTFE here, a smidge of 'grease' there, which when pressed for detail always turns out to be fairy liquid. Arguably I did the hard bits - core drilled the holes for the extractor and waste pipe and cut the cast iron soil pipe. So I need to learn. Part of the problem is I don't know the lingo. For example I wanted to attach the tap to the hot and cold feeds but I was stumped as to what to type into the Screwfix search-bar. Furthermore, when looking at pipes you only get a snapshot of the system so why don't they have labels of what they are and an arrow for direction of flow? Grrr.

💸 The Cost

What should a new family bathroom cost? I'm not really sure, but to decide whether I've done well or not here are three rough benchmarks we can use to compare against. You can decide which is the best datapoint.

1.

According to this article and others like it the average new bathroom costs in the region of £8k.

Now add in that ours was a bedroom to bathroom conversion (new plumbing + electrics), we're in the SE, the UFH, the floor to ceiling mainly porcelain tile, the higher quality fittings and it being a little larger than average I think it's fair to bump that up to £15k.

2.

Abi's favourite YouTuber is Lilly Pebbles. Amongst make-up tutorials she does some good house renovation vlogs (work done by builders) that I'll sit through from time to time. Our bathroom is modelled on hers which in turn was modelled on a hotel bathroom she saw in Brooklyn, New York. Here's an article with pics from the company that designed and supplied hers - worth a look to see how similar it is.

As an aside, I only looked at this properly when I was doing the herringbone and copied the trim around the edges of the niches but it's interesting that her builders and I came to the same decision to butt the porcelain tile rather than use trim.

At the bottom of the article it states 'from £17k'. My bet is it was more but since our bathroom is a little smaller, doesn't have a walk-in shower or Japanese toilet, I'll go with that figure. That's just the layout, design and tiles/fixtures, not the work. For that I wouldn't be surprised if it were £20k+ for North London. We're not in London but close enough that prices don't differ significantly but let's say a total of £35k for our bathroom to be designed/supplied and fitted.

3.

Lastly there's a rule of thumb of spending 5% of a property's value on the main/family bathroom so, again, that would be in the tens of thousands.

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Here are our costs, broken down into five categories:

Structural

Total: £2,096.19

Electrics

Total: £636.19

Tiling

Total: £2,024.97

Bathroom Suite/Fixtures

Total: £2,649.73. Here's that poll we did for comparison:

Plumber and shower pump

Total: £2,741.51

Overall Total: £10,148.69

I got a few freebies from Marmox (the tape and some sealant), I used a £50 Screwfix voucher someone kindly sent me and there are a few things we intend to buy such as a toilet roll holder. Add in some mileage and cost for electric - we'll round it up to £10,500.

That seems...rather a lot. Certainly more than I hoped but I guess the one good thing about it taking so long is that we didn't have to set aside that amount upfront, it was spent in drips and drabs. Around 80% of the spend was on materials and looking through the lists above, there's nothing I wish we'd spent less on.

Success comes down to what it would have cost to get the exact same result done professionally and wrapped up in a few weeks. If that were the first figure - £15k - then it was a bit of a waste of time doing it myself. If however it would have been more like the second and third figures - £30k+ - then it was time well spent. I also had fun, learnt a load of new things and am proud of my efforts, which is half the point.

One thing's for certain, it's a great improvement on our previous bathroom!

This shower is just pitiful. Ripping it all out is my next task 🔨😀.

👋

Hit "reply" if you've got any comments on this week's newsletter – otherwise I'll see you next time. Have an epic week :)

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