Wet Rooms in Stoke-on-Trent

Falls to the drain

With no tray to hold the water, the floor itself has to carry it away. A preformed board or a screed laid to a slope does that job, steep enough to clear water quickly and gentle enough that nobody feels it underfoot.

Linear or centre drain

A linear channel along one wall needs the floor to slope one way only, so large tiles can run across it uncut. A centre drain pulls the floor in from four sides, which suits smaller tiles or sheet flooring. Joist direction often settles which works.

Tanking the whole room

Spray reaches well beyond the shower head, so the membrane covers the full floor and runs up the walls, with every joint and pipe entry sealed. Grout alone would let water reach the boards below.

Screen or fully open

A single fixed glass panel keeps the basin, the WC and the towels dry. A fully open room looks cleaner but works best when there is space for the spray to fall well short of everything else.

Ventilation

A whole wet floor puts more moisture in the air than a tray does. Our electricians fit a properly sized extractor with a timed overrun and certificate it with the rest of the bathroom wiring.

Warmth underfoot

A tiled floor you stand on barefoot is the best case for heating mats, and they dry the floor faster too. Electric underfloor heating goes down before the tile in the same job.

Most upstairs bathrooms across Burslem, Tunstall, Longton and Fenton sit on timber joists, often in a back addition with a sloping ceiling and walls that are some way out of square. A wet room suits those rooms well because dropping the tray and the step gives floor back. The work is in the build-up, which usually means dropping the deck between the joists so the former and drain sit flush, then fixing everything down hard so nothing flexes under the membrane.

Where the drain can go depends on which way the joists run and how far the waste has to travel to the stack, so that is measured at the survey rather than guessed. A downstairs wet room in an older terrace usually sits on boards over a void that relies on airbricks, and that void is kept ventilated.

Concrete floors are a different job. The slab is cut back to make room for the drain and the falls, or the floor is built up and the threshold has to be thought through. Floors from the interwar years to the 1970s get a damp test before we price, since some were laid with no working barrier underneath.

Single-storey homes are the simplest to convert, because there is less floor to build up, and the bungalows round Seabridge and Clayton in Newcastle-under-Lyme suit a level shower well. In Stafford the period centre and the modern estates around it each bring their own kind of floor, and we plan for both.

What does a wet room cost?

The size of the room, the floor it sits on, how far the drain is from the stack and the tile you pick all move the figure. A timber floor that needs lowering, or a slab that needs cutting, is the biggest single variable.

The bathroom ranges are supplied and fitted with tanking included, and the same list applies in every town we cover. Heating mats and floor levelling are priced per square metre and shown as separate lines.