A Bathroom that won’t Break the Bank

Our Master Bathroom is complete, with the exception of a few finishing touches (like a mirror, which I guess is an essential), but I’m excited to have a room that feels semi-finished so have jumped the gun a little with the blog post.

Also important to note may be the fact that our Master Bathroom is actually smaller than our En Suite. Being a small room and a bathroom that is going to get very little use as it is just the two of us, we wanted to come up with something that we’d be really pleased with but wasn’t going to absorb a huge chunk of our budget.

I’ll give a run down on the bathroom as a whole, let you see some pictures and end with a breakdown of the overall cost. 

I’m definitely #TeamShower but, ever since the first viewing of our house, I had visions of a clawfoot bath in the place of the special “primrose” number that had been lovingly installed by the previous owners. Here’s the problem, most clawfoot bathtubs of the dimensions we needed were over £700. And that’s not including taps, waste and sometimes even the feet (I know, right?).

Anyway, after much searching and deliberation, I stumbled across Victorian Plumbing (no, not Victoria Plum) and found their Winchester Complete Roll Top Bathroom Package. The package includes a toilet, a basin, a bath and a towel rail with all taps, waste and any other trimmings you might need, all for £799.95 – less than the cost of some of the footless baths I’d been looking at!

An immediate and obvious reservation we had before ordering was the potential quality of the bathroom suite. I have to say, whilst I would rather more subtle feet on the bath, we’ve been really impressed and not just with regards to the price. Impressed full stop.

Check it out for yourself.

We had already ordered a standard towel rail through our heating engineer, but I was delighted when we found a suite that included this radiator.

I love this free-standing mixer tap and am a little obsessed with the standpipes, for some reason.

The only part of the bath I’m not totally pleased with is the feet, which I would prefer to be either a brushed metal or painted finish. That being said, I can’t argue with the quality even if it isn’t to my liking.

The package comes with a white plastic toilet seat and a light MDF one as well, which are the only items that are pretty poor quality. I am going to put a darker wood seat on to match the floor.

The grey subway tiles are from Topps Tiles and cost £29.50/m² and I’m really pleased with them. I chose to tile halfway and paint above to echo Edwardian and Victorian dado rails, and also because grey subways all over would be overbearing because of the size as well as colour.

As it is in the bathroom, the flooring is obviously laminate but I am really impressed, and it was so easy to fit. Purchased from flooringsupplies.co.uk, we went for Quickstep Impressive Ultra Classic Oak Brown which has actually gone up in price (along with all Quickstep flooring) since we purchased. FYI if you do want to use Quickstep in your bathroom, you will need to use their Impressive Ultra range to ensure it is waterproof.

Now for the interesting part.

Budget Breakdown

Winchester Bathroom Package, Victorian Plumbing – £799.95

Quickstep Flooring, flooringsupplies.co.uk – £149.33

Metro Grey Tiles, Topps Tiles – £295.00

We used white paint we had already bought for the rest of the house. Top tip, there are some great paint deals for pallets of trade white paint if, like us, you ever want to base coat a large area in white after plastering.

The total cost for our (small) Master Bathroom was £1,244.28 (give or take a bit of extra expenditure on a mirror and other finishing touches) which we are so pleased with. According to a stat from The Bath Store, the average cost of a new bathroom in the UK is £4,500 and a “budget bathroom” is considered to be £2,500, so I’m patting myself on the back right now.

We didn’t pay for labour so that is a huge cost saving, but I know a lot of my fellow mad men and women in the renovation community are keen DIY-ers (not through choice) so it is a true representation of cost for a lot of you.

I’ll keep updating this as we add more items into the bathroom to keep the budget as realistic as possible. In the meantime, I hope this was interesting or helpful or just that you liked looking at the pictures.

Our En Suite is now underway and we’ve used the leftover tiles from the Master Bathroom (taken off the budget) because Greg liked the look so much.

Progress updates and pictures of the En Suite and the rest of the house to follow soon.

Finally, no update on a finished room would be complete without a Before & After…