Bathroom renovation in Nieuwegein

A bathroom renovation is work whose most expensive part you never see again. You see the tiles, you see the vanity unit, you see the tap. What you do not see is the drain sitting on the right fall, the waterproofing in the shower corner, the pipework behind the wall and the substrate the tiling rests on. That is exactly where the difference sits between a bathroom that lasts and a bathroom that looked lovely on handover day.

Below is what such a renovation involves, in what order I work, when it can be done without ripping everything out, and where the price comes from. I do the work myself, so you hear it from the man who will be on his knees in that shower corner.

What happens under the tiles

Strip-out is the stage where a bathroom turns honest. As soon as the old tiling comes off, you finally see the state of the walls behind it. Plaster blocks that have drawn moisture, a timber wall that is softer than it should be, pipes running somewhere other than you would guess from where the taps sit. That is why I order the final tiles after the strip-out and not before. Do it the other way round and halfway through you have to choose between waiting and improvising.

Then comes the pipework. Supply and drainage go in where the sanitary ware is going to sit, not where it used to sit. Move a toilet or a shower and that is the job that costs the most work, because a drain needs fall and that fall has to come from somewhere. In a house with a concrete floor that often means the pipe disappears into a raised section of floor.

Then the fall and the waterproofing. The shower floor has to run down to the gully or the channel, and you build that into the substrate, not into the tile adhesive. On that substrate goes a waterproof layer, with sealing tape in the corners and around every pipe penetration. This is the part you never see again, that is on no photo at all, and that decides whether the ceiling of the room below is still dry in a few years. It belongs in a quote by name. If it is not there, ask about it.

Only after that do the tiles go on, then the sanitary ware, and right at the end the sealant. That order is not flexible. Every step needs the previous one dry and flat, and that waiting is exactly why a bathroom is not finished in a weekend.

Renovating a bathroom without breaking anything out

Not every bathroom has to come out. If the layout works, the sanitary ware sits in the right place and there is nothing wrong behind the tiles, you get a long way without a sledgehammer. That saves on rubble removal, it saves on disruption and it saves on cost.

What is possible then: tiling over the existing tiles, raking out the grout and refilling it, replacing every bead of sealant, renewing the shower screen or the glass, swapping the taps and the shower set, taking out the old vanity unit and putting in a new one with a mirror. Replacing a toilet or a basin can usually be done without opening up the wall too, as long as the connections stay where they are.

What honestly comes with that. Tiling over tiles only works if the bottom layer is rock solid. If a tile sounds hollow when you tap it, the new layer will eventually come off together with the old one. The floor also gets thicker, and you pay those millimetres back at the door, the threshold and the height of the shower tray. And the most important one: if water has ever got behind the tiles, a new layer solves none of it. You make it invisible, and invisible damp is more expensive than visible damp.

So I tell you up front, after looking and not after starting, whether this is a bathroom you can do up or a bathroom where doing it up is a waste of your money. If I am in any doubt I take one tile off to see what is behind it. That is a small hole against a big assumption.

What makes a bathroom renovation more or less expensive

I do not put figures on this site, because an amount without your bathroom next to it says nothing. What it depends on I can explain, so you can lay two quotes side by side and understand why they differ.

It gets more expensive mainly from moving things. If the toilet stays where it stands and the shower comes back in its old spot, the renovation is essentially strip-out, build-up and finishing. Move the sanitary ware and the floor or the wall opens up for new drainage, and that is the heaviest item there is.

Other things that weigh in: the number of square metres of wall that has to be tiled, and that is almost always more than people estimate. The size of the tile, because a large tile needs a flatter substrate and more cutting. The pattern, because mosaic and herringbone cost far more hours per square metre than a straight bond. Whether a walk-in shower with no threshold is going in. And the state of what sits underneath, which you only know for sure after the strip-out.

It gets cheaper from choices nobody sees and you do notice yourself. Leaving the sanitary ware where it is. A common tile size in a straight bond. Wall tiles up to a sensible height instead of everywhere up to the ceiling. And having it all done in one go instead of in stages, because building up and clearing away again every time costs time you pay for twice.

One thing does not push the price down but does protect it: choose your materials before the work starts. A tile that turns out to be unavailable halfway through brings the whole planning to a stop.

Walk-in shower, bath, or both

The biggest choice in a bathroom is not the colour, but whether a bath stays in. A bath costs space you lose from the shower, and in most bathrooms there is no room for both. So I always ask: how often has that bath been used in the past month? An awkward question with an often very clear answer.

Go for a walk-in shower with no threshold and the tiled floor runs on into the shower, with the water leaving through a linear drain or a gully. That asks more of the fall and of the waterproofing, but it makes a small bathroom look bigger and it is the version you can keep using later without alterations once stairs and stepping over things get harder. What that looks like is on the project page of a walk-in shower with no tray and no threshold.

Grout, sealant and ventilation

Three things a bathroom usually gives up on first, and none of them is a big job.

Grout is not a seal but a filler. The waterproof work sits underneath it. Grout that discolours or goes powdery you rake out and refill, and that is small work instead of a refurbishment.

The beads of sealant in the corners and along the shower tray are deliberately flexible, because that is where the structure moves. That makes sealant a wear part. If it goes black or lets go, that is not a cleaning problem but a replacement job, and the sooner you do it, the less sits behind it.

Ventilation is the part most often skipped in a renovation and most often the reason there is mould on fresh grout. A bathroom has to be able to get rid of its moisture, through a window or through extraction that really pulls. If there is an old, clogged extractor in the ceiling, the moment to deal with it is exactly the moment that ceiling is open anyway.

A builder for the bathroom, or separate trades

Renovating a bathroom is not one trade. There is strip-out in it, pipework, tiling, some carpentry and fitting out. Arrange that separately and you are the one keeping the order, and the one making the calls when the tiler is standing at a locked door because the pipework is not finished.

With me it hangs on one number. I do the strip-out, the pipework, the waterproofing, the tiling and the fitting out myself, so I plan the order against my own diary instead of against that of four firms. That has a limit too and I would rather name it up front: I work on my own, so I can only be on one bathroom at a time and my planning is tight because of it. What you get back is that there is nobody to point at when something goes wrong.

If the bathroom runs along with a bigger renovation of a floor or the ground floor, that is the moment to combine it. The same goes for the tiling and flooring in the rest of the house, because tiles from the same delivery match each other better than tiles you order again a year later. And if it stays with a dripping tap or a shower screen that needs replacing, that simply falls under one-off jobs and maintenance.

The bathrooms that are online

With this kind of work photos say more than a description. There are a few on the site, and they deliberately show different kinds of job.

A bathroom in white marble look with an anthracite wall behind the shower, with black framed glass and a floating vanity unit. A bathroom in marble look with gold taps, where wall and floor run on in the same large format. And a job from the other end of the spectrum: a wall around an existing bath that has been retiled, where the bath simply stayed where it was and only the wall was stripped back. That last one is exactly the work you do not have to demolish your whole bathroom for.

Where I renovate bathrooms

I work out of Nieuwegein and come to the towns around it. For bathrooms and renovations in Utrecht I do not have far to go either, so coming by once more to take measurements or to look at a tile choice in real life is no problem.

If you want to know what your bathroom is going to cost, send me a few photos. One of the whole room, one of the shower corner and one of the ceiling. I get a lot out of that. Then I come and measure, because dimensions you read off a photo are not right, and in a bathroom every centimetre counts.