"How long is the bathroom going to take?" is usually the first question after the price. The honest answer: most full bathrooms run between two and three weeks, with bigger jobs (wetrooms, layout changes, structural work) running into a fourth. But that is not very useful on its own — what people actually want to know is what their house will look like next Tuesday.
Here is a realistic week-by-week breakdown of how a Plumbworks bathroom typically runs.
Day 1: Strip-out
The room comes apart. Old suite out, tiles off, plasterboard down where it needs to go. Floors get covered, doorways protected, dust sheets hung. The skip arrives, fills, and goes. By the end of day one you'll be looking at bare walls and exposed pipework, and the rest of the house is still livable.
Days 2–3: First fix
This is the bit nobody sees and everybody lives with. Pipes get rerouted to land where the new suite needs them. Wastes get repositioned. Soil-stack adjustments, if there are any. Wall build-outs for concealed cisterns, recessed niches, hidden valves. Pressure testing. This is also where any hidden surprises behind the old suite show up — old lead pipes, hairline leaks somebody papered over, that sort of thing — and where they get fixed properly.
Days 4–5: Plastering and boarding
Walls go back on — moisture-resistant plasterboard for tile zones, or proper plaster skim where surfaces will be painted or have decorative finishes (Venetian plaster, micro-cement). The plaster needs a few days to set before tiles can land on it, so this often overlaps with the weekend.
Week 2, days 6–9: Tiling
This is the big one and the one that earns the room. Floor first, then walls. Large-format porcelain, natural stone, mosaic borders — whatever the spec calls for. Mitred edges where two tiled surfaces meet at a corner. Grouting follows once the adhesive has set. This is the slowest part of the job because rushing it shows up forever.
Days 10–11: Second fix
Bath, basins, tap ware, screens, toilet, towel rail. Mirrors hung, niches lit, lights tested, electrics signed off. The room starts to look like a bathroom again.
Day 12: Sealing and snagging
Every silicone bead, every sealed joint, every grout line gets checked. The walk-through with you happens on the same day or the morning after — a chance to flag anything that catches your eye. We snag and sign off together.
What can stretch this out
A few common things add days:
- Wetroom tanking — adds a couple of days for the membrane and the cure time before tiling.
- Layout changes — moving a soil stack, relocating a window, knocking a wall through. These need their own first-fix steps.
- Specialist finishes — Venetian plaster and micro-cement are several layers, each with cure time. Add two to four days.
- Supply delays — usually only an issue if you've spec'd a tap that needs ordering from Italy. We'll flag it on the quote.
What we won't do to "be quicker"
Skip a tank-out. Tile onto the wrong base. Grout before the silicone has cured. Promise a finish date we can't actually hit. The reason a Plumbworks bathroom runs for two-and-a-bit weeks is that two-and-a-bit weeks is what it takes to do it properly — and the room you're left with on day 12 reflects that.
Got a project you want a real timeline for? Drop us a line and we'll come round.