Advice

How to actually do it

One procedure per page, from the first move to the last, with the step that settles the outcome flagged as such — and the equipment a page takes for granted is linked because it takes it for granted, not because it pays. Where a job depends on what is behind your wall, the page says so and sends you to the maker's instructions.

Getting started

What to change first, in what order, and why a pair of angle valves is worth fitting before anything else.

Where to start in a bathroom you have just inherited Nothing here needs a wall opening or a professional. It is the order that turns a bathroom you inherited into one you can change a piece at a time, and it begins with the least interesting purchase in the catalogue.

Measuring first

The four measurements to take before ordering anything, where to take them from, and the one that is almost always taken wrong.

The four measurements to take before you order anything Bathroom fittings are bought on photographs and returned on measurements. These four take twenty minutes with a tape, they settle most of what you can buy, and three of them cannot be taken with the old fitting still in place.

Installation

Isolating the supply, reaching a back nut, tightening without marking chrome, and leaving enough slack to undo it again.

Sealing & joints

PTFE against fibre washers, sanitary silicone against ordinary, and why nothing sticks to a joint that has had silicone in it.

Resealing a shower joint so it lasts A reseal that fails within a year almost always failed at the start, before the cartridge was opened. Getting the old bead and its residue off is the slow half of this job and the half that decides whether the new one holds.

Water & limescale

Finding your hardness figure, descaling an aerator or a head, and what a softener does and does not change.

Your water hardness, and what to do with the number Every softener capacity in this catalogue is quoted against a hardness, and without yours the numbers cannot be compared at all. The figure is free, your supplier publishes it, and it changes more purchases than people expect.

Buying

How to spend a budget so the money lands on what decides the outcome, rather than on the finish in the photograph.

Spending a bathroom budget where it changes something In this catalogue the relationship between price and result is unusually weak, because so much of what is sold is a finish over the same mechanism. This page says where the difference is real.

Safety & the rules

Turning the water off, electricity in a damp room, and what each maker states — with the source behind the rule.

Turning the water off, and where a job stops Every job on this site starts by isolating the supply, and most of them end there when something does not move. This page covers doing it properly, and it is explicit about the three kinds of work that belong to somebody else.