Pagham bathrooms are mostly about staying put
We have a level-access wet room under way in the village now, on Rose Green Road. Across the parish, the numbers explain why so much bathroom work here is about access. Pagham is a parish of bungalows and older owners: at the 2021 census 38 per cent of residents were 65 or over, one in five was 75 or over, and more than six in ten homes were owned outright.
People who own a bungalow outright and are in their seventies are not, by and large, planning to move. They are planning to stay, and the bathroom is usually the first room that has to change to let them.
Why a bungalow bathroom is the easiest to adapt
There is no stair, so the bathroom is already on the floor the person lives on. The question is the floor itself. Many Pagham bungalows sit on a concrete slab, and a level-access shower on a slab means forming falls to a linear drain in the screed above it, and designing the doorway threshold so there is no lip at all. Where the floor is suspended timber, the falls are built between the joists. Both are routine. Neither can be changed once the tiles are down, which is why we settle the floor at the survey, not on the day.
The Arun grant: occupational therapist first
Arun District Council's Disabled Facilities Grant pays up to £30,000, means-tested for adults, for adaptations including wet rooms, walk-in showers, downstairs bathrooms, ramps and wider doors. The first step is an assessment by a West Sussex County Council occupational therapist; OT Connect is on 01243 642121. The OT writes the recommendation, the council approves the grant, and the work follows.
The step people skip is the one that costs them the grant: Arun cannot approve work that has already been done. If you think a grant might apply, call the OT before you call us. We are used to pricing to an OT's written recommendation and invoicing in whatever stages the funding needs.
Water underneath, water from the tap
Two kinds of water matter to a Pagham bathroom. The first is groundwater. Away from the front the parish sits on coastal silts and clays with the water table close to the surface, and in November 2022 much of Pagham was under water after heavy rain, with some homes flooded for the first time. A ground-floor wet room is connected low on the drainage, so we check the run and the outfall before we design it, tank the floor properly, and consider a non-return valve where the drain is likely to surcharge.
The second is what comes out of the shower. Portsmouth Water supplies Pagham from the chalk, at 267 to 315 milligrams per litre across its supply zones, which it classes as hard to very hard. That means scale on glass, on shower heads and inside thermostatic valves. We fit valves serviceable from the front, heads with rubber nozzles, easy-clean screens and a drain with a lift-out trap.
Railway carriages had bathrooms too, eventually
The Pagham Beach Estate started life before the First World War as holiday homes, many made from old railway carriages, and residents' recollections from the 1950s and 60s describe a home on Harbour Road where the bathroom was literally in a carriage, and carriage houses on East Front Road still intact in 1958. Most of those houses have since been rebuilt; some still have a carriage body inside the walls. A bathroom refit in a beach estate house starts by finding out which you have, because a timber carriage floor and a modern wet room need careful detailing to live together.
Listed Nyetimber
Nyetimber has a cluster of Grade II listed buildings: the Lion inn, Nyetimber House, Inglenook, Nyetimber Forge, Mill Cottage, Greensleeves, the windmill and the barns at Mill Farm. A bathroom inside a listed building needs listed building consent for anything that alters its historic fabric, from a soil pipe through an old floor to an extract fan through a wall.
What it costs
The bands on our price guide all 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 from scratch at £7,200 to £18,000. Pagham is quoted on the same rates as Bognor Regis.
The trade is under bathroom fitting; the town page is bathrooms in Bognor Regis and the village is on builders in Pagham. If the bathroom needs a new room around it, see house extensions in Pagham.
Tell us who will use the bathroom and whether an occupational therapist is involved, and James will come and look at the floor and the drain before anyone draws a layout. Ring 07470 078236. Itemised written price, staged payments, two years' guarantee on our work.