Bathroom Fitters in Newcastle-under-Lyme

Newcastle bathrooms are generally easier to work with than the ones we deal with in the Potteries terraces. The interwar semis at Westlands, Poolfields, Clayton and May Bank were built with a proper upstairs bathroom rather than one added later into a back addition, so the rooms are squarer, the ceilings are level and there is usually space for a bath and a separate shower rather than one over the other.

What those houses do have is a separate toilet in its own little room next door, which made sense in 1935 and makes very little now. Combining the two is the most requested bathroom job in this part of the borough, and the good news is that the wall between them is almost always a stud partition or a single skin of brick carrying nothing. That means no beam, no engineer and no approval — it comes out as part of the bathroom job.

The result is a room wide enough for a bath along one wall and a proper walk-in shower in the corner where the WC used to sit, which is what most people wanted in the first place.

The ex-local-authority stock at Chesterton, Knutton, Cross Heath and parts of Silverdale is different again. Solid construction, decent room sizes, but bathrooms that have usually had one cheap replacement somewhere along the way — often with tiling straight onto plaster and no tanking behind the shower. Those come back to the substrate rather than being refreshed.

Round Seabridge, Clayton and the quieter edges of the borough there are a good number of bungalows, and a growing number of people in them who would rather adapt than move. A level-access wet room is the single most useful change you can make to a bungalow, and it is far easier to do in one than in a two-storey house because the floor build-up is simpler.

We cover Newcastle town centre, Westlands, Poolfields, Clayton, May Bank, Wolstanton, Porthill, Bradwell, Thistleberry, Seabridge, Basford, Cross Heath, Knutton, Silverdale and Chesterton, out to Keele, Madeley and Audley.

Plenty of Newcastle semis still have an airing cupboard in or beside the bathroom with an old vented hot water cylinder in it, taking up the best part of a square metre of floor and a full height of wall.

Reclaiming it is tempting and often worth doing. But it usually means moving from a vented system to a combi boiler, and boiler work is not something we take on — it is a specialism with its own approvals and warranties, and there are firms locally who do nothing else.

So if that is the plan, the boiler change happens first with a heating specialist, and we fit the bathroom into the reclaimed space afterwards. Tell us at the survey and we will sequence around it.

What we can do without touching the boiler is rebuild the cupboard smaller, box the cylinder in properly, or reconfigure the room around it so it stops dominating — which is sometimes all that was needed.