Cheshire Bathroom Fitters | Knutsford | Sandbach | Holmes Chapel | Middlewich

Wet rooms have been having a moment for a while now. They look great in magazines, they photograph beautifully, and there’s a general perception that they’re the premium, modern choice. We get asked about them regularly.

The honest answer — and we’d rather give you an honest answer than just agree with whatever you’ve seen on Pinterest — is that for most homes and most customers, a shower tray is actually the better option. Here’s why.

First, let’s talk about wet rooms properly

A wet room is essentially a fully waterproofed shower area with no tray or enclosure — the floor itself is graded to drain, and the whole area is tanked so water can’t get anywhere it shouldn’t. Done properly, it’s a genuinely impressive installation. Done badly, it’s one of the most expensive bathroom mistakes you can make.

There are two main types:

Tiled wet rooms — the most common, and the version most people picture. The floor and walls are tiled throughout, with a central or linear drain. They look excellent when first installed. The practical reality over time is that grout lines on the floor collect dirt, and the better the slip rating on the floor tile — which you absolutely need for safety — the more texture the tile has, and the more effectively that texture traps grime. Keeping a tiled wet room floor genuinely clean requires more effort than most people anticipate.

Vinyl wet rooms — these use a continuous sheet of specialist vinyl flooring, similar to Altro, which has a gritty texture for grip. You’ll often see this type in assisted living environments. Over time, the same problem applies — the texture that provides grip also collects dirt and requires chemical cleaning to maintain properly. We don’t fit vinyl wet room systems, so if that’s what you’re after we’re not the right company — but it’s worth understanding the difference before you decide.

The preparation nobody talks about

The bigger issue with wet rooms isn’t the surface — it’s everything underneath it. A properly installed wet room requires significant preparation: the floor needs to be built up and graded correctly to ensure water drains away rather than pooling, and the entire wet area needs to be comprehensively tanked before a single tile goes on.

There are plenty of shortcuts available at every stage of this process, and none of them should be taken. A wet room where the tanking has been done properly is a long-term installation that will perform well for years. A wet room where corners have been cut looks exactly the same on day one — and starts causing serious problems within a few years as water finds its way into places it shouldn’t be.

If you want a wet room, be prepared to pay for all of the preparation you’ll never see once it’s finished. That’s where the money goes, and it’s money well spent. But it does mean that a properly installed wet room is a more expensive option than most people expect.

So when does a wet room actually make sense?

There are situations where a wet room is genuinely the right choice. The most clear-cut case is accessibility — if stepping up into a shower tray is difficult or going to become difficult, a level-access wet room solves that problem properly. For customers thinking about their bathroom in terms of the next twenty years rather than just right now, that’s a real consideration worth having.

Beyond accessibility, it comes down to personal preference. If a customer specifically wants a wet room and understands what’s involved, we’ll fit it — and we’ll fit it properly, without shortcuts. But if someone asks us for our honest advice and they can comfortably step up 30mm into a shower tray, that’s what we’ll recommend.

Why shower trays are underrated

A shower tray is a simpler installation with less that can go wrong. There’s no complex floor grading, the tanking is straightforward, and the enclosure sits cleanly on top of the tray with a proper seal. Maintenance is easier — the tray itself is smooth and simple to keep clean.

They’re also considerably more versatile visually than people often assume. Slate effect trays, for example, come in a wide range of colours and finishes and look genuinely premium in the right setting. An ultra-low profile tray — just 25-30mm high — gives you almost the same visual effect as a wet room floor, with a fraction of the preparation complexity and cost.

The perception that a shower tray is somehow the budget or compromise option really isn’t accurate. A well-chosen tray in a well-designed shower enclosure looks excellent and performs better over the long term than a wet room in most domestic settings.

The straightforward version

If you’re asking us for a recommendation — and many customers do — here’s our honest position. Wet rooms are genuinely worth it where accessibility is a factor, or where a customer has a strong preference for them and understands the cost involved in doing them properly. In most other situations, a quality shower tray with a frameless or semi-frameless enclosure gives you a better everyday experience, easier maintenance, and a lower overall cost.

Trends come and go. A bathroom that’s practical, well-built and easy to live with never goes out of style.

Not sure which is right for your home?

Give Martin a call on 07734 703414 for a free, no-obligation chat and visit. We cover Middlewich, Sandbach, Northwich, Knutsford, Holmes Chapel and Winsford, and we’ll always give you an honest recommendation based on your property and your situation — not just what sounds impressive.

Cheshire Bathroom Fitters — based in Middlewich, working across Cheshire for over 20 years.

 

We were recently working on a job in Middlewich — renovating an ensuite and refitting a small cloakroom at the same time. The cloakroom was a straightforward scope: new toilet, new vanity and basin, and a redecoration of the walls and ceiling.

While we were sanding the walls back, the customer came in and asked what we were doing. Fair question — to most people, if you’re redecorating, you just paint over what’s already there.

Why we sand first

This cloakroom had been decorated several times over the years. Each coat of paint had gone straight over the last, and the result was what you’d expect — a mottled, slightly uneven surface where years of layers had built up unevenly. You can paint over that, and it’ll look fine from a distance. But under a fresh coat of paint in a newly refitted room, every bump and variation shows.

Sanding the walls back flattens all of that out. It gives you a smooth, even surface that the new paint can go onto cleanly. The difference in the finished result is immediately noticeable — the walls look properly done rather than just freshly painted.

It’s the same reason good decorators sand between coats rather than just applying the next one straight over. The preparation is what determines the finish.

It’s a small thing — but it matters

A cloakroom refit is a relatively small job. New toilet, new vanity, fresh decoration — it shouldn’t take long and it doesn’t cost a fortune. But that’s exactly why the details matter. A small room gets looked at closely. There’s nowhere for a poor finish to hide.

Taking the time to sand the walls before painting costs maybe an extra twenty minutes. The difference it makes to how the finished room looks is disproportionate to the time involved. It’s just one of those things we do as a matter of course — whether it’s a full bathroom renovation or a small cloakroom tidy-up.

Same job, same standards. Every time.

Thinking about a bathroom refresh in Cheshire?

If you’re in Middlewich, Sandbach, Northwich, Knutsford, Holmes Chapel or Winsford, give Martin a call on 07734 703414 for a free, no-obligation quote.

Cheshire Bathroom Fitters — based in Middlewich, working across Cheshire for over 20 years.

There’s an assumption most people make about new build properties — that because everything is brand new, everything has been done properly. In our experience, when it comes to bathrooms, that assumption is almost always wrong.

A job in Holmes Chapel last year brought this into sharp focus. The property was eighteen months old. The customer wanted the bath removed and an open plan shower fitted in its place. Straightforward enough brief — but before we’d even started, the cracked grout on the existing tiles told us something wasn’t right.

What we found when we opened the wall

Once the tiles came off, the picture was exactly what we’d suspected. The plasterboard behind them was covered in black mould and was already breaking up. Eighteen months old. Never been touched since the builders handed the keys over.

The cause was straightforward. Water had been getting behind the tiles through the failing grout — cheap adhesive and grout applied without any waterproofing membrane underneath. Plasterboard, once water reaches it, behaves like a sponge. It absorbs moisture, swells, degrades, and provides the perfect environment for mould to take hold. It doesn’t take long. In this case, eighteen months was all it needed.

Before any new installation could go in, the damaged plasterboard had to come out completely, the area had to dry out properly, and everything had to be rebuilt from scratch with the waterproofing done correctly this time. A job that should have been straightforward became significantly more involved — and the customer was left paying to fix a problem that should never have existed in the first place.

The new build problem

In over 20 years of fitting bathrooms across Cheshire, we have never seen a large new build development where the bathroom has been properly tanked. Not once.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment. Tanking — applying a waterproof membrane before tiling any wet area — is a standard part of a professional bathroom installation. It’s not expensive, it’s not complicated, and it’s the single most important thing you can do to protect the structure of the room behind the tiles. And the large national developers simply don’t do it.

The reason is straightforward: volume and margin. On a large site development, the bathrooms are being turned around as quickly as possible. Tiles go straight onto plasterboard, adhesive and grout are the cheapest available, and the job is done. It looks fine on the day. The problems come later — often well within the first few years of the property being occupied.

It’s worth being fair here though. This isn’t a criticism of every builder. Smaller contractors doing bespoke one-off or two-off builds will often take a completely different approach — they have a reputation to protect in a way that a national developer operating at volume simply doesn’t. The issue is almost entirely specific to large site developments.

Why cheap grout fails so quickly

A new build property, for the first few years, is still moving. The structure is settling, there’s natural expansion and contraction as the building dries out, and that movement puts stress on everything — including the grout lines between tiles.

Cheap, rigid grout has no ability to flex with that movement. It cracks. Once it cracks, water gets in. And if there’s no waterproofing membrane behind the tiles to stop it, that water goes straight into whatever’s behind — usually plasterboard.

We use Mapei grout on every job specifically because it’s flexible. It can accommodate the small amounts of movement that every building experiences without cracking. In a new build that’s still settling, that flexibility isn’t a luxury — it’s essential. We also only ever use premium bagged flexible adhesive. Ready-mixed adhesive from a tub has its place, but it isn’t it in a wet area that needs to last.

What about the plasterboard itself?

Some people raise an eyebrow at plasterboard being used in a wet area at all. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that plasterboard is a perfectly acceptable background for bathroom tiling — provided it’s tanked correctly before anything goes on top of it. A proper waterproofing membrane means water never reaches the board in the first place, so the fact that it would absorb moisture if it got wet becomes irrelevant.

For those who want absolute belt-and-braces peace of mind, tile backer boards — such as Wedi board — are an alternative. They’re completely waterproof by nature and don’t need tanking in the same way. We’ll fit them where a customer specifically wants them. But in our honest view, if the tanking is done properly, the background material matters far less than people think. The membrane is doing the work.

What’s not acceptable — ever — is plasterboard with no tanking and cheap grout. Which is, unfortunately, what most new build bathrooms amount to.

If you’ve moved into a new build in the last few years

If you’re in a large development property and your bathroom is starting to show cracked grout — even if the property is only a year or two old — it’s worth taking seriously rather than just regrouting over the top. The grout cracking is a symptom. The question is whether water has already been getting behind the tiles, and what state the wall behind them is in.

We cover Holmes Chapel, Sandbach, Northwich, Middlewich, Knutsford and Winsford — all areas with significant new build development over the last decade. If you’re seeing early signs of problems in a newer property, give Martin a call on 07734 703414. We’ll give you an honest assessment of what’s there and what, if anything, needs doing.

Cheshire Bathroom Fitters — based in Middlewich, working across Cheshire for over 20 years.

It’s one of the first things people notice on the website, and it does occasionally put people off before they’ve even made contact. We only fit bathrooms that we’ve supplied. If you’ve already bought your suite, your tiles, your shower enclosure — we’re not the right company for you.

That’s a deliberate policy, and it’s worth explaining properly. Because it’s not about being difficult — it’s about being honest.

We used to do fit-only work

Earlier in the business, we took on fit-only jobs. A customer would source everything themselves, we’d turn up and install it. Seemed straightforward enough.

The reality was that it was almost impossible to control the outcome. Customers would arrive with products bought on price — cheap suites, budget tiles, enclosures from the bottom of the range — and expect a result that looked and performed like a quality installation. The two things don’t always go together.

The problem we kept running into was the guarantee. We’ve always offered a 12-month workmanship guarantee on everything we fit. But when you’re fitting products you haven’t chosen and can’t vouch for, the line between a workmanship issue and a product issue gets very blurry, very quickly. In practice, we were going back to jobs time and again — and in virtually every case, when we got there, the problem wasn’t how it had been fitted. It was what had been fitted.

A cheap shower valve that starts dripping after four months. Tiles that aren’t flat enough to lay properly without the finished surface showing it. An enclosure with components that don’t align the way they should. None of that is a fitting problem. But we were the ones going back to deal with it, on our own time, because our name was on the job.

After enough of that, the decision made itself.

It’s not just about cheap products

This is the bit that sometimes surprises people — it’s not that we’ll only work with budget goods and refuse anything premium. It’s that we need to know and trust what we’re fitting, whatever the price point.

There are products at the higher end of the market that we find genuinely difficult to work with — enclosures from certain well-known brands that are needlessly complicated to install, with components that don’t go together as smoothly as they should. The price tag doesn’t make them easier. In some cases it makes the job take longer, which costs the customer more in labour time and gives us a headache we didn’t need.

The same applies to tiles. High street tile shops sell some perfectly good products — but they also sell a lot of tiles that are inconsistent in thickness, slightly warped, or just difficult to lay well. A professional tiler can work with them, but it takes longer, and the finished result is never quite as clean as it would be with a properly manufactured tile from a trade supplier. We end up spending more time achieving a result that’s still not quite as good — and it’s our name above the door.

What we use instead — and why

Everything we supply comes from established manufacturers with a proven track record. Not necessarily the most expensive brands, and not the cheapest — but brands that have been around long enough that we know exactly how their products go together, how they perform over time, and what their after-sales support looks like if something does need attention years down the line.

That familiarity matters more than most people realise. Fitting a suite or enclosure you’ve fitted dozens of times before is faster, cleaner, and less likely to throw up surprises than fitting something you’ve never seen before. That efficiency benefits the customer directly — the job runs more smoothly, the programme is more predictable, and the finished result reflects what we’re actually capable of.

What this means for you

If you’re at the early stages of thinking about a new bathroom, this policy actually makes things simpler rather than more complicated. You don’t need to spend weeks researching products, comparing specs, and worrying about whether you’ve made the right choices. We handle all of that.

You tell us what you’re looking for — the style, the feel, the must-haves — and we’ll put together a supply and fit package with products we’re confident in, at a price that’s transparent from the start. Our quotes are fully itemised, fixed price, and typically run to several pages. No vague line items, no surprises when the bill comes in.

The 12-month workmanship guarantee covers everything, because we’ve chosen everything. If something isn’t right, there’s no question about whether it’s a fitting issue or a product issue — it’s our responsibility either way, and we’ll sort it.

That’s a much cleaner arrangement for everyone — and it’s the reason the policy isn’t going to change.

Getting in touch

If you’re in Middlewich, Sandbach, Northwich, Knutsford, Holmes Chapel or Winsford and thinking about a new bathroom or ensuite, give Martin a call on 07734 703414 for a free, no-obligation quote. We’ll visit the property, discuss what you’re after, and put together a fully itemised written quote with no obligation.

Cheshire Bathroom Fitters — based in Middlewich, working across Cheshire for over 20 years.