Tenement bathrooms, done right

Most Glasgow tenements were built in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, before indoor bathrooms were standard. Many flats got theirs later, squeezed into a box room, the end of a hall or a former cupboard. That's why so many tenement bathrooms are long and narrow, have odd boxing in the corners, or have a window that's in exactly the wrong place for the bath.

Behind the walls you'll often find generations of changes. There's copper next to old lead or galvanised pipe, waste pipes that have been extended more than once, and floorboards that have been lifted and nailed back down many times. None of that is a disaster. It just means we don't assume anything until we've looked.

In most tenements the toilets connect to a shared soil stack, often a big cast-iron pipe that serves every flat in the stair. It decides where your toilet can sit, because the toilet waste needs a large pipe with a steady fall to reach it. That's why tenement toilets are nearly always on the wall nearest the stack, and why moving them far is usually out of the question.

Connecting to an old cast-iron stack needs care. It's shared, so a bad joint doesn't just affect you, and the pipe itself can be brittle. We connect with proper fittings and check the condition of the stack where we can see it. If we spot a problem with the shared pipe, we'll tell you, because that's a matter for the whole stair and usually the factor.

Tenement floors are timber boards on timber joists, with your downstairs neighbour's ornate ceiling underneath. Before we tile, we check the joists for old notches and rot and build a rigid, flat base so tiles don't crack when the floor flexes. In the shower area we tank the floor and walls properly. Water getting through a tenement floor is the fastest way to fall out with the people below.

If you want a walk-in shower or a wet room, the depth of your joists decides what kind of drain we can fit. Sometimes that means a linear drain along the wall, or a shower area raised slightly with a gentle upstand. We'll show you the options at the survey.

Tenement bathrooms often have one solid sandstone wall and one lath-and-plaster partition. They need different fixings and different preparation. Old plaster may need to come off and be re-boarded before tiling. High ceilings are a bonus: they give you room for a tall mirror cabinet, a statement light, or tiling to a crisp line with a bold paint colour above.

Water pressure varies a lot between flats. Ground and first floors are usually fine on mains pressure. Some top-floor flats still have an old cold water tank in the roof space feeding the bathroom, which gives weaker pressure. We test at the survey and recommend a shower that works with your supply, which might be a mixer on a combi or an electric shower.

Everything goes up and down the common stair: the old bath, the rubble, the new suite, boxes of tiles. We protect the close and your hall, keep the stair clean, and bag up waste as we go rather than leaving it on the landing. A courtesy note to your neighbours about noisy days goes a long way, and we're happy to give you the dates to share.

If you have a factor, it's worth letting them know about the work, especially anything that touches the shared stack. Some changes to a flat, like new drainage or taking out walls, can need a building warrant. We'll flag that at the survey so you can check with the council before work starts.