What's the most expensive part of a bathroom renovation?
Labour — and within labour, tiling. A fully tiled south London bathroom carries £950–£1,500 of tiling labour alone, and moving soil pipes or upgrading old plumbing adds fast. The suite people budget hardest for is usually the smallest line on the invoice.
A typical full renovation invoice splits roughly: a third on plumbing and electrics (first fix, valve, certification), a third on tiling and waterproofing, and the rest across strip-out, flooring, fit-out and making good. The £700 suite from the warehouse and the £2,200 showroom suite sit in bathrooms whose totals differ far less than that gap suggests, because everything around them costs the same.
The two lines that blow budgets: moving the WC (the soil pipe is the least movable object in the house, and every metre of new run needs fall, support and boxing), and floor-to-ceiling tiling on all four walls, which roughly doubles the tiling labour versus wet-walls-only. Both are worth doing when the design earns them — they are just the honest place to look first when a quote needs trimming.
The corollary: the cheap-looking quote has usually trimmed the invisible third. If a quote is £2,000 under the others, the missing money is nearly always in tanking, first-fix, or certification — the parts you cannot see at handover and meet again in eighteen months.
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