Homes & villas - conventional bathrooms

How does Homes & villas - conventional bathrooms work, step by step?

1. 1

   Step 1: Fix the layout against the real ware

   Before any pipe is cut, the sanitary schedule is set against the room. Every item is checked for its actual dimensions - pan projection and outlet position, basin waste height, bath length and the handing of its waste end, tray size and drain position, shower valve inlet centres - and marked on a full elevation of each wall. Doors and their swings, radiator or towel rail positions, the vanity unit width and the tile module are all laid over the same drawing. On most projects this exercise finds at least one clash before it becomes concrete, and it is far cheaper to move a line on paper than a soil branch in a floor.

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   Step 2: Run the carcass supplies and wastes

   First fix runs the pipework while floors and stud walls are still open. Supplies are commonly in plastic push-fit or press-fit for speed and in copper where the specification wants it, clipped at regular centres so nothing can move or knock. Wastes fall towards the stack, sized and graded by the services engineer, with joints kept accessible where they can be and sleeved where they pass through structure. Notching and drilling of joists follows what the structural designer allows rather than what is convenient, and services crossing zones are recorded so that a later screw does not find them. The whole first fix is set out from the finished floor and finished wall lines, not from the bare structure.

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   Step 3: Pressure test and photograph before covering

   Nothing is buried until the pipework has been tested and the result written down. Supplies are tested to whatever the specification sets and held while every joint is walked and looked at; wastes are filled or air-tested and the traps checked. Then the whole wall and floor is photographed with a tape or scale rule in shot, so that six months later somebody can find the pipe without a hammer. That photographic record is the cheapest quality document on a house and it is the one most often skipped.

4. 4

   Step 4: Set frames, trays and baths before the wall closes

   Concealed cistern frames, shower trays, wet-room formers and baths are the items that decide the finished geometry, and they all have to be right before anything covers them. Frames are fixed plumb and square, braced back to structure, and set to the finished floor level rather than the screed. Trays and baths are bedded solid so they cannot flex under a person - a bath that moves will break every seal around it - and their wastes are connected and run before the panel goes on. The flush plate and valve positions are set now, because moving them afterwards means new tiles.

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   Step 5: Coordinate boxing, ducts and access

   Boxing to conceal stacks and valves is built to the tile module and sized so that access panels land on a full tile or a deliberate joint rather than in the middle of a cut. Every concealed valve, isolator, cistern and trap is given a route to it - a hinged panel, a magnetic tile section, a removable bath panel - and that route is agreed with the designer rather than invented by the joiner. On most projects the argument here is about aesthetics against maintainability, and the rooms that age well are the ones where maintainability won.

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   Step 6: Tile, then set the ware

   Tiling is set out from the focal walls so that cuts fall where they are least seen, with full tiles at the visible edges and cuts run into corners and behind the ware. Penetrations through the tiling for valves, wastes and fixings are drilled once, cleanly, and sealed as the tiling system requires. Only when the tiling and grout are ready does the finished ware go on: pans connected with proper connectors rather than improvised offsets, basins and vanities fixed level into real fixings, taps and wastes made up with the correct washers, and screens and rails anchored into structure or proper cavity fixings rather than into unsupported board.

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   Step 7: Fill, flush and prove every appliance

   Every item is put into service and watched. Cisterns fill and flush without weeping at the pan connection, wastes run and drain with the trap holding its seal, mixers deliver hot and cold on the correct sides, and overflows are proved by actually overflowing them into a bucket. Isolators are checked to see that they isolate what they are labelled as isolating. Leaks are found now, in a room that is still empty, or later through a ceiling that is not.

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   Step 8: Seal, protect and hand over

   Sanitary sealant goes in last, after testing, so that no leak is sealed inside a joint. Junctions between ware and tiling are tooled continuous, with the bath filled with water before the bath-to-tile joint is sealed so that the joint is formed at its widest. The room is then cleaned, protected and closed to other trades, and handed over with the commissioning notes, the guarantees and the key or tool that actually opens the access panel.