The two things that ruin bathrooms are both invisible when it is finished. One is waterproofing. The other is water pressure. Everything else — the tiles, the brassware, the vanity unit — is the easy part, and it is the part every showroom wants to talk about.
A wet room is a waterproofing job with a bathroom on top. The tanking membrane is the entire product: it goes over the whole floor, up the walls to at least the shower height, into every corner with a bonded joint, and it is the only thing between your shower and the ceiling below. We tank it ourselves rather than subbing it out, because when a wet room leaks it does not drip — it soaks a joist for a year and then the ceiling comes down.
Falls are the other half of it. A wet room floor has to fall to the drain across the whole showering area, and on a suspended timber floor that means forming the fall in the deck before anything else happens. Retro-fitting a fall into a floor that was laid flat does not work. On a Victorian terrace with a timber first floor, this is usually the part of the job that takes the time.
Pressure decides your shower before you do. A gravity system with a tank in the loft gives you maybe 0.1 bar per metre of head, which is why the shower in a lot of period houses round here is disappointing — and it is why a pump or a switch to an unvented cylinder does more for the experience than any showerhead ever will. We measure the flow and the pressure at survey and tell you what your options actually are, rather than letting you buy a rain head that will dribble.
One local note: because Trafford water is soft, the chrome and the glass stay clean here in a way they simply do not in a hard water area. It is a small thing, but it means you can specify a walk-in screen without committing yourself to a lifetime of scale removal.
