Bathroom refit in Caversham: stripping a 1980s suite back to the studs

The job

Mr and Mrs J live in a 1980s semi off Henley Road in Caversham (RG4). Bath, basin, and a separate WC, all in original avocado, with tongue-and-groove pine panelling halfway up every wall. They wanted the lot out, a single big walk-in shower in, and a clean modern finish that wouldn’t look dated in five years. We’d done their boiler in 2022, so they rang us first.

We did the design visit on the Tuesday, sent the 3D visual and the fixed-price quote on the Friday, and started on site the following Monday. End-to-end, five working days from strip-out to handover.

Day 1: strip-out, and what was behind the panelling

The bath came out in two pieces. The pine panelling came off in about forty minutes. Then the day went sideways for a bit, in two ways.

First, the floor joist immediately under the bath waste was rotten for about 600mm of its run. Forty years of a slightly weeping overflow had quietly turned the timber to porridge. Not a drama, but it adds half a day. We sistered a new C24 joist alongside the old one, screwed and glued, and re-laid the deck.

Second, the cold feed to the basin was lead. Not unusual for an early 1980s build that picked up bits of older pipework, but lead gets ripped out the moment we see it. We cut it back into the airing cupboard and ran new 15mm copper from there forward. The client got a £40 line item on the invoice for “remove and replace short run of lead pipe”, and that’s it. We don’t pretend we “found a problem” we caused, and we don’t bury legitimate finds in the labour line either.

Days 2 to 4: first fix, tiling, second fix

First fix took the back end of Tuesday. We moved the waste run two feet toward the soil stack, which let us drop the new walk-in shower against the outside wall and get a proper fall on the gulley. New 22mm hot and cold to the shower, 15mm to the basin and the close-coupled WC, push-fit tested at 6 bar overnight.

Wednesday and Thursday were tiling. The client picked a 600 by 300 white metro for the walls, with a Bardiglio stone band running at shoulder height, and a small marble hex on the shower floor for grip. Lewis is a perfectionist about tile-cuts around fixings, so the cuts around the thermostatic valve and the niche took most of a morning between them. Worth the time, every time.

Friday was second fix and the snag walk: shower controls live, screen up, basin and tap on, WC on the wall, sealant in. We hand the client a fresh microfibre cloth and a spare cartridge of the sealant we used, and we take everything else away.

Day 5: sign-off

Mrs J stood in the new shower in her socks, ran the water for a minute, and asked us why we’d talked her out of black taps. (The honest answer: black taps look great for two years, then the chrome shows underneath wherever you’ve dropped the ring-pull on a face-cream tube.) She forgave us.

Final invoice landed exactly at the figure we quoted, plus the £40 line item for the lead pipe, signed off and paid the same day.

Three things we learned (or had reinforced)

• Always allow contingency in a quote on a 1980s build. We carry a 5% line for “previously hidden” on every older bathroom and we tell the client in writing what triggers it and what doesn’t. Nobody likes a surprise, but everyone likes a number that’s the truth.
• The magnetic filter on the boiler earned its keep again. We added one in 2022 when we did the heating. The system flush we ran after re-piping the basin came out clear. That’s a year of prevention paying for ten minutes of service-day reward.
• Soil-stack moves are worth doing properly. The two-foot offset on the waste run cost us about an hour of joinery and a 22mm fitting. It saved a future blockage at the trap, and the shower will drain cleanly for the next twenty years.

If you’ve got a 1970s or 1980s bathroom and you’re thinking about a refit, ring us before you commit to a suite. Half the cost of a job like this lives behind the panelling, and the only way to price it honestly is to come and have a look.