One Felpham resident in twelve is over eighty
The 2021 census counted just over a thousand Felpham residents aged 80 or more, out of a parish of about twelve thousand, and more than eight hundred people whose day-to-day activities are limited a lot. Those two numbers explain a good part of the bathroom work we are asked to price here. Not every Felpham bathroom is a wet room, and plenty of the jobs are family bathrooms and en-suites in the bigger estate houses. But the question we hear most often in the village is some version of: how do I make this bathroom one I can still use in ten years?
The answer depends on the house. In a 1950s or 60s Felpham semi, or one of the newer Flansham Park houses, the bathroom is upstairs on a timber floor and a level-access shower means forming the falls between the joists. On a bungalow the floor is often a concrete slab, and the falls go into the build-up above it. On a Hurstwood or Beach Estate chalet the bathroom may be upstairs, under a slope, up a stair that is getting harder to climb, and the right job may be a new shower room on the ground floor instead.
The chalet problem: the bathroom is in the roof
Felpham has a lot of chalet bungalows, most of them from the 1930s, with bedrooms and sometimes the only bathroom in the roof. They were good houses to buy and are hard houses to grow old in. We look at three options with owners. Keep the bathroom upstairs and make the stair safer. Move the main bathroom down into what was a bedroom or a dining room, which means a new soil connection, a ground-floor drainage run and a new extract. Or add a compact shower room downstairs and keep the upstairs bathroom for visitors.
The second and third options are drainage jobs before they are tiling jobs, and on a chalet the drainage usually decides which is cheaper. We open a manhole at the first visit and look at where the run goes before anyone falls in love with a layout.
The Arun grant, and the order you have to do things in
If the bathroom is being adapted for someone with a disability, Arun District Council's Disabled Facilities Grant can pay up to £30,000. It is means-tested for adults, and Arun names wet rooms, walk-in showers and downstairs bathrooms among the works it covers. The route in is not the council: it starts with an assessment by a West Sussex County Council occupational therapist, through OT Connect on 01243 642121, who then refers the case to Arun.
The one rule that catches people out is timing. The grant cannot be approved for work that has already been done. So if a grant might apply, ring the occupational therapist first, let them write the recommendation, and get us to price to it. We are happy to work to an OT's specification and to sit in on the visit if that helps.
Hard water and the shower you choose
Portsmouth Water supplies Felpham from the chalk, and its Bognor-area figures sit around 300 milligrams per litre, the boundary between hard and very hard. In a bathroom that shows up as white bloom on glass, scale in the shower head and, eventually, a thermostatic cartridge that sticks. We specify for it from the start:
- a thermostatic valve whose cartridge can be serviced from the front, rather than one that needs the tiles off;
- shower heads with flexible nozzles that can be rubbed clean;
- screens with a factory-applied easy-clean coating, and as little glass as the layout allows;
- on a wet room, a linear drain with a removable trap you can lift out and descale.
Old village bathrooms, inside flint walls
At the other end of Felpham, in the conservation area along Felpham Road, Limmer Lane, Vicarage Lane and Waterloo Road, the houses are older and built of flint cobble, brick and sometimes cob, and several of them are listed. A bathroom in one of those is mostly an ordinary job with two extra considerations. A solid flint wall wants to breathe, so we avoid sealing it behind impervious board without a reason. And the extract has to go somewhere that does not involve a new hole in a listed elevation without consent. Inside a listed building, almost any alteration to the fabric needs listed building consent, and we would rather check than guess.
What it costs
Our price guide bands all include VAT. A like-for-like swap runs from £4,800 to £10,800. A full refit runs from £9,600 to £21,600. A wet room or level-access shower is £8,400 to £21,600, and a new en-suite built from scratch is £7,200 to £18,000. What moves a Felpham bathroom inside its band is usually the floor, the drainage route and whether the WC stays put.
The wider service is bathroom fitting, the village is on builders in Felpham, and the town page is bathrooms in Bognor Regis. If the answer is a new ground-floor room rather than a new bathroom, see house extensions in Felpham.
Tell us whether the bathroom is upstairs or down, and whether an occupational therapist is involved, and James will tell you which route is cheaper before anything is drawn. Ring 07470 078236. Two-year workmanship guarantee, manufacturers' warranties passed on in full, and a written price that itemises every line.