How a bathroom fit actually runs.

We come and look at the room. That is not a formality — it is where the price comes from. Where the soil pipe runs decides whether the WC can move. The floor build-up decides whether underfloor heating will fit without the door catching. Whether the walls are anywhere near true decides how much of the first two days goes on preparation rather than tiling.

You then get a written price for the whole job. If something can only be priced once the room is open — and occasionally that is genuinely true, usually with old joists or hidden damp — we say so up front rather than discovering it later.

Order the tiles and the suite with enough lead time, and get them delivered before day one — a bathroom stalled waiting on a back-ordered screen is the most avoidable delay there is. Check every box of tile for the same batch number while the delivery driver is still there.

Clear the room, work out where the household is going to wash for the duration, and if there is only one WC in the house, say so at quote stage. It changes the order we do things in so you are not without one for longer than necessary.

The old suite comes out, the old tiles come off, and the waste is bagged and taken away rather than left in the front garden. Floors get lifted where pipework has to change. This is the loud, dusty day, and it is the day the room tells you the truth about what is behind it.

Anything unexpected — rotten boards under a leaking tray, a previous repair done badly, a joist someone has notched to within an inch of its life — gets shown to you and discussed before it gets covered back up.

The second step is always the pipework. Feeds and wastes are re-routed — most often out of the floor and into the wall — so the radiator or towel rail, WC, basin and shower sit where the new layout wants them. Falls on waste runs get set properly, because a shower that drains slowly is almost always a fall that was eyeballed.

Everything that is about to disappear behind a board gets tested while it is still reachable. Gas work and notifiable electrical work is brought in from the appropriate registered trade at this point, not bodged around.

Walls get boarded and made flat. This is the stage that decides whether large-format tiles are going to work, because a big tile cannot follow a bowed wall — it bridges the hollow and then lippage appears at every joint. Floors get levelled for the same reason.

Wet areas are tanked: a waterproof membrane taken over the whole shower zone and up the corners and junctions, so that if water ever does get past a grout line it meets a barrier rather than a plasterboard sandwich.

Electric mat or loose cable goes down on the prepared base and is meter-tested before anything covers it, so a fault is found while it can still be fixed. It is then set into a levelling compound rather than tiled straight over, so the tiles bed onto a flat surface and there is no risk of a trowel catching a cable.

It gets meter-tested a second time once it is covered, and again after tiling. The electrical connection to the thermostat is made by a qualified electrician.

Before any adhesive is mixed, the room gets set out dry. Centre lines are found, the bond is confirmed, and the cuts are balanced so that you do not end up with a full tile on one side of the window and a five-millimetre slither on the other.

This is also where the awkward decisions get made and agreed with you: which wall the pattern centres on, whether courses line through across a return, where the movement joints go. Ten minutes of thinking here saves a room that always looks slightly wrong and nobody can say why.

Tiles are fixed, working out of several boxes at once so any shade variation between batches spreads evenly across the wall instead of showing up as a band. Large formats get a levelling system to keep edges flush. Then adhesive is left to cure — properly, not hurried — before grouting.

Grout goes in, the haze comes off, and internal corners and the joint where tile meets bath or tray are siliconed rather than grouted. Those joints move, and grout cracks when it is asked to move.

Suite, taps, shower, screen and radiator go in, everything is run and checked for leaks, and the extractor is tested. The floor is cleaned down and the waste goes with us.

Then you get shown round it: what has been siliconed and why, how long to leave it before the first shower, what to use on the tiles and what to keep well away from them. The tile-care guide on this site covers the same ground in writing.