The downstairs bathroom in a Victorian terrace
Plenty of Littlehampton's Victorian and Edwardian terraces were built without a bathroom at all. When one was added, often in the mid-twentieth century, it went in the cheapest place: at the back of the ground floor, behind the kitchen, in the old scullery. Many are still there. The most common terrace bathroom job is moving it upstairs, usually by taking a slice off the back bedroom or the box room, and giving the ground floor back to the kitchen.
That is a drainage job before it is anything else. A first-floor bathroom needs a soil connection with enough fall, which on a terrace usually means a new stack on the back wall, and the WC wants to be close to it. We plan the layout around the waste route, not the other way round, and on a party wall we keep the soil stack and the noisiest pipes off the neighbour's side.
Bathrooms in converted flats
Nearly one Littlehampton household in twelve lives in a flat inside a converted or shared house, and a fifth more in purpose-built flats. A flat bathroom is governed by the lease. If anything is moving, the freeholder or managing agent will want to approve it, because the soil stack is shared and the floor is the ceiling below. We build the floor with a proper waterproof layer under the tiles and acoustic underlay where the lease asks for it, and we test the waste and supply before the tiler starts, not after the flat downstairs reports a stain.
On the seafront, in the conservation area, the extract grille and any new pipe on the front of the building are planning matters. The town has an enforcement history on exactly this sort of thing, including the 2014 appeal over windows at 25 South Terrace. We route vents and pipes to the back.
Level access, and the grant
About one Littlehampton resident in four was 65 or over in 2021: a younger town than its neighbours, but still more than five thousand people. For a level-access shower or a downstairs bathroom, Arun District Council's Disabled Facilities Grant pays up to £30,000, means-tested for adults. The first step is an occupational therapist's assessment through West Sussex County Council's OT Connect on 01243 642121, and the grant cannot be approved for work that has already been done. If a grant is possible, the OT goes first and we price to their recommendation.
Hard water
Southern Water supplies the town and the water is hard; independent water-softener suppliers put it at around 240 to 280 parts per million, and Southern Water's postcode checker gives the official figure. In a shower that means scale on glass and in heads, and thermostatic cartridges that stiffen. We fit valves serviceable from the front, heads with flexible nozzles, coated glass and, in wet rooms, drains with lift-out traps.
Landlords' bathrooms
A quarter of Littlehampton households rent privately, and a good deal of bathroom work in the town is for landlords between tenancies. The brief is durability and speed: a programme that fits the void, a tray rather than a tanked floor unless there is a reason, robust fittings that can be replaced like for like, and extraction that actually clears the room, because condensation complaints are the commonest ones in rented flats.
Moving materials in
Terraced streets near the centre are tight. With no controlled parking zone in Littlehampton there is no permit for our van, but a skip on the road needs a county council licence. We keep a bathroom strip-out to bags where the street is too narrow for a skip.
What it costs
All the bands on our price guide include VAT: a like-for-like swap at £4,800 to £10,800, a full refit at £9,600 to £21,600, a wet room or level-access shower at £8,400 to £21,600, and a new en-suite built from scratch at £7,200 to £18,000. Moving a bathroom upstairs usually sits in the full-refit band plus the cost of the new partition and drainage, which the quotation shows as separate lines.
The trade is under bathroom fitting; nearby are bathrooms in Rustington and bathrooms in Arundel. The town is on builders in Littlehampton.
Tell us where the bathroom is now and where you want it, and James will tell you where the waste can go before anyone draws a layout. Ring 07470 078236. Itemised written quotation, two years' guarantee on our workmanship.