Shower Room Derby

A bath eats floor space that a lot of Derby bathrooms simply don't have, especially in the older terraces around the Cathedral Quarter and the streets running off it, where the original bathroom was often squeezed into whatever space was left once the bedrooms were laid out. Swapping that bath for a shower room, or converting a box room, landing cupboard or spare bedroom into one, is one of the most common jobs a shower room installer in Derby gets asked to do. It's usually driven by one of two things: the bath sits there unused, or someone in the house needs safer, easier access to wash without stepping over a high side.

This page covers what actually goes into a shower room in Derby, whether that's a straightforward enclosure swap or a full wet room formed into a new space: the enclosure types, the plumbing and electrics behind the tiles, what tends to catch people out in older Derby housing stock, and what it costs once you get past a vague "from £X" figure. If you already know roughly what you want, skip to the pricing and process sections below. If you're still weighing up a shower room against a wet room, the FAQ covers that difference properly.

• Full strip-out of the existing bathroom suite, including the bath, old tiling, old flooring and any dated fittings
• Tanking and waterproofing of walls and floor before a single tile goes down - this is the part that matters most and shows least
• A new shower tray or a formed wet-floor with drainage set to the correct fall, so water runs to the gully instead of pooling at the edges
• Enclosure and screen fitting - framed, frameless or bi-fold - in soap-and-detergent-resistant glass where you want less scum to clean off
• First and second fix plumbing for the shower valve itself, whether that's an electric shower, a thermostatic mixer, or a pumped power shower
• Electrical work for shower units, extractor fans and lighting, carried out by a Part P approved electrician
• Non-slip flooring, grab rails and level-access thresholds where accessibility or mobility is part of the brief
• Wall and floor tiling, including bespoke cuts around recesses, niches, seating or half-height boxing
• Ventilation sized and fitted to current Building Regulations for a room with a shower in it
• Full waste clearance from the strip-out, taken away by a licensed waste carrier rather than left for you to skip

• Structural work to form a new opening or take out a load-bearing wall - this gets priced separately once a builder has actually looked at it, not guessed from a photo
• Boiler replacement or upgrade, if a site visit shows the existing system genuinely can't deliver enough pressure for the shower you want
• Underfloor heating - available, but it's an add-on that needs specifying at quote stage, not assumed as standard
• Moving the soil stack or waste run any real distance, which adds both plumbing work and sometimes floor-void work to get the falls right
• Replastering beyond the shower room itself, if damp or failing plaster turns up once the old tiling comes off elsewhere in the property

1. Deciding tray or wet floor, at your home -- Someone visits the actual room rather than working from a photo or floor plan, checks the water pressure and boiler, and - if it's a box room or bedroom being converted rather than an existing bathroom - works out where the nearest soil stack actually runs to. The enclosure type gets decided here rather than left until later, because a tray-based shower and a fully dipped wet floor need different floor build-ups underneath, and that decision affects almost everything that follows.
2. Checking what's behind the existing tiling -- Before a figure goes on paper, the practical constraints get looked at properly: whether the joists are deep enough and running the right direction to form a dipped wet floor without dropping the ceiling below, what the current tanking - if any - is doing behind the old tiles, and how far the waste actually has to travel if the room's moving to a new location.
3. A layout you can see and a price broken down by item -- CAD and 3D drawings show the enclosure, tiling and fittings in the actual room dimensions before anything is booked in, alongside a fixed quote itemised by trade - plumbing, electrics, tiling, joinery - so it's clear what each part of the job costs rather than one number with no breakdown.
4. Stripping out the old suite -- The bath, old tiling, flooring and any dated fittings come out, and everything leaves site with a licensed waste carrier rather than sitting outside for the rest of the job.
5. Forming the fall, tanking, and running services -- This is the stage that decides whether the room stays dry: the floor is set to the correct fall towards the drain or gully, walls and floor are fully tanked, and first-fix plumbing and electrics go in for the shower valve, extractor fan and lighting - all before a single tile is laid.
6. Tiling, enclosure fitting and the final walk-through -- Tiles are cut around niches, recesses or seating, the enclosure or screen goes in, grab rails are fitted if they're part of the brief, and the room gets checked with you before the guarantee paperwork is handed over.

A shower room usually costs less than a full bathroom, because there's no bath to plumb, tile around and dispose of, and often a smaller footprint of tiling overall. But the honest answer is that the figure moves around a lot depending on what you're starting from. A straightforward swap of an existing bath for a shower enclosure in a room that already has the plumbing and drainage roughly where you need it costs a good deal less than converting a box room or spare bedroom into a new shower room from scratch, where a stud wall might need building, waste needs running to a new location, and electrics need extending. Forming a proper wet room - with a fully tanked, dipped floor rather than a raised tray - adds cost over a standard enclosure because of the extra structural and waterproofing work involved in getting the floor to fall correctly. For context, full bathroom design, supply, installation and project management for this company typically starts from around £5,000 depending on room size, products chosen and any building work involved, and a shower room conversion is generally priced below that full-bathroom figure rather than above it, given the pricing is always worked out as a fixed, itemised quote rather than a number given over the phone. It's fair to say this isn't the cheapest shower room installation you'll find in Derbyshire, and that's a deliberate choice - a shower room with poor tanking or badly cut falls looks fine on the day it's finished and starts causing problems, damp, and lifting tiles a year or two later, which ends up costing more to put right than it would have cost to do properly the first time. A proper figure for your room needs someone to actually see it, check the water pressure, look at the boiler and confirm what's behind the existing tiling - that's what the free consultation is for.

A shower room usually fails eighteen months to two years after it's finished, not on the day the tiler leaves, and the two things that decide whether that happens sit behind the tiles rather than in the room. The first is the fall: whether the floor under the tray or wet-floor was actually cut to send water towards the drain or gully. Because a shower room's footprint is tighter than a full bathroom's, there's less room for the fall to correct itself if it's slightly off - a corner that's even a few millimetres shallow will pool water in that same spot every day, and you won't see it happening until the grout starts staining or the ceiling below starts to smell damp. The second is cure time: tanking membrane that gets tiled over before it's properly gone off doesn't bond the way it should, and that's invisible the day the job finishes.

Both of those risks come down to how the trades handle the handover between each other, because a shower room job packs the plumber cutting in the valve, the electrician running cable for the extractor and any downlights, and the tiler working around what's been left for them into the same small space over a day or two. Where that goes wrong is usually when those three people are meeting each other for the first time on that job, pulled together by a subcontractor for the day, because nobody's checking that a cable's been tested before it gets tiled over or that the valve position hasn't shifted since the tiler last looked. The same plumber, electrician and tiler here work together on the next shower room too, and only one bathroom runs at a time rather than a crew being split across several sites, so the tanking gets its proper cure time instead of being rushed to free people up elsewhere. The 5-year guarantee on labour and installation covers exactly this part of the job - the fall and the tanking - because it's the part that's hardest for a homeowner to check themselves once the room is finished and grouted.

The bulk of the shower room work is in and around Derby itself - city-centre flats and apartments near the Cathedral Quarter, where space is often tightest and a shower room genuinely makes more sense than a bath, through to the older terraces and semis further out. In Allestree, Darley Abbey, Markeaton and the streets near Markeaton and Darley Parks, a lot of the work is converting a spare bedroom or box room into an en-suite shower room for a growing family, which usually means running new waste and electrics rather than just swapping an existing suite. Out towards Spondon, Alvaston and Chellaston, in the commuter belt around Pride Park, shower room conversions are often squeezed into a tighter turnaround between a house sale and a move-in date. In Belper, Duffield and along the Derwent Valley Mills corridor up towards Milford and Matlock, older stone-built and listed properties sometimes need a more considered approach to tanking and fixings, given the walls and floors aren't always as straightforward as a modern build. Further out towards Bakewell, Matlock and Ashbourne on the edge of the Peak District, the shower rooms fitted tend to lean towards natural stone-effect tiling and matte black fittings that suit the setting. Beyond Derby, coverage extends across Derbyshire and into Nottingham, Sheffield and Nottinghamshire, and out to Long Eaton, Ilkeston, Belper, Ripley, Heanor, Swadlincote, Burton on Trent, Mickleover, Littleover, Breadsall, Quarndon, Borrowash, Alfreton, Willington, Repton and Buxton.

If you're weighing up a shower room against keeping the bath, or trying to work out whether that spare bedroom could take an en-suite, the free home design consultation is the right place to start - no showroom, no pressure, and a fixed itemised quote once someone has actually seen the room and checked the water pressure and plumbing behind it. If accessibility or mobility is part of the reason you're looking at this, it's worth booking that consultation sooner rather than later rather than living with a bath that's becoming harder to use.

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