Bathroom Fitters in Huntingdon

Oxmoor. Built through the 1960s to take London overspill, with the first block of houses on Elm Close going up around 1961, and named features a local would recognise in Sallowbush Road, Sapley Square and the Medway Centre. This is the single biggest bathroom stock in the town and it behaves consistently. The room is small, it is usually still where it started, and the waste took the shortest route available at the time. Two things bite. Floor build up, because those joists were sized for lino and a steel bath rather than porcelain and a deep filled bath, so we check depth, span and deflection at survey. And the heating leg, because a lot of that stock was upgraded later with 8mm and 10mm microbore, and a big heated towel rail on a silted microbore leg will never get properly hot. While the wall is open is the time to find out.

The medieval and Georgian core. The conservation area covers Huntingdon and Hinchingbrooke as one designation, originally made on 9 May 1972 with Victoria Square added in 1991, and it holds 122 listed buildings, four of them Grade I, plus seven scheduled ancient monuments. Along the High Street, Princes Street, St Mary’s Street and Ermine Street most of the historic fabric runs from the 17th to the 19th centuries in buff and red brick and render, under plain tile or slate. Bathrooms in that stock mean uneven joist depths, out of square rooms and soil pipe routing that has to be designed rather than assumed. Where a property is listed, altering historic fabric can need consent from Huntingdonshire District Council in its own right, and we raise that before anything is ordered.

The Victorian expansion and the 1920s council stock. Around Victoria Square, Newtown and the Priory area, and along Great Northern Street, Sayer Street and St John’s Street, the bathroom is often in a rear addition with cold external walls on two or three sides and a waste that has been extended more than once by more than one person. We replace the whole waste arrangement rather than tee into somebody else’s improvisation, and we insulate behind the boarding while it is open. A cold, beautifully tiled room that streams with condensation every winter morning has failed.

Hartford, and the riverside streets. Hartford was a separate village until 1935 and sits on the north bank of the Great Ouse, with All Saints’ Church dating from 1180. The Environment Agency maintains a flood warning area for the Great Ouse at Huntingdon and Hartford, naming Waters Meet, Temple Close, Hartford Road, Tennis Court Avenue, Nursery Road and Brookside in the town, and Main Street, Church Lane, The Grove and Old Houghton Road in Hartford. If you are on one of those roads and you want a ground floor wet room or a new cloakroom, levels, materials and where a new waste discharges all deserve discussion before we price it.

Groundwater, which matters more than people expect. Huntingdonshire’s own flood risk work records high groundwater flood risk in the town and notes a Source Protection Zone that restricts infiltration based drainage. Practically that means a damp patch near a ground floor shower is not automatically the shower, and we would rather establish the cause than tear out a tray that was doing nothing wrong.

Sapley, Stukeley Meadows and Alconbury Weald. Sapley and Stukeley Meadows are later twentieth century suburban stock where the constraints are joist depth and fall on a new waste. Alconbury Weald, on the old airfield to the north west, got outline permission in October 2014 for up to 5,000 homes, with the developer now citing up to 6,500, and the first residents moved in during 2016. On that stock the job is upgrading a builder’s specification: a serviceable valve, coated glass, a better tray and tiling finished the way you wanted.