Most people ask us for a price on a new kitchen and bathroom before they know what they actually want, which is completely fair. The trouble is that the same two rooms can cost £9,000 or £45,000 depending on decisions you have not made yet. Here is how the numbers really break down, based on the sort of properties we work on around Swansea.
For a standard Swansea semi or terrace with a kitchen around 10 to 14 square metres, budget roughly £7,000 to £14,000 all in for a decent mid range job. That covers stripping out, new units, worktop, appliances, plumbing, electrics, plastering, flooring and tiling. Push into solid quartz worktops, integrated appliances and a bespoke or in frame kitchen and you are comfortably at £18,000 to £30,000.
The units themselves are often the smaller half of the bill. Labour, first and second fix plumbing and electrics, plastering and making good typically account for 45 to 55 per cent of the total on a like for like replacement. If you move the sink, hob or boiler position, that share rises.
A full bathroom refit in a typical three bed house runs £5,000 to £9,000 for mid range fittings, tiled floor to ceiling, new sanitaryware, extractor and lighting. A small cloakroom or en suite can be done for £2,500 to £4,500. Wet rooms are the outlier: proper tanking, a formed former and a linear drain add £1,500 to £3,000 over a standard shower enclosure, and they are not a corner worth cutting.
Tiling is where bathroom budgets quietly inflate. Large format porcelain looks superb but needs a flatter substrate, more prep and slower fixing, so labour goes up as well as the tile price. Mosaics are worse per square metre than almost anything else.
A lot of the housing stock here is pre 1930s, and that matters. Solid nine inch walls in Brynmill, Uplands and Mount Pleasant mean no cavity to chase easily and often lime plaster that will not take modern bonding without prep. Older Swansea properties frequently have lath and plaster ceilings and undersized joists, which shows up the moment you want a freestanding bath or a walk in shower on a first floor.
Coastal properties in Mumbles, Bishopston and along the Gower edge deal with more damp and salt laden air, so extraction specification genuinely matters rather than being a tick box. We also still find plenty of lead supply pipes, backboiler remnants and pre 2005 wiring that has to be brought up to current regs. None of this is a disaster, but it explains why a quote from a plan and a quote after a proper survey can differ by thousands.
Combining a kitchen and bathroom into one project usually saves 10 to 15 per cent versus running them separately. You pay for one set up, one skip run, one plasterer visit and one set of mobilisation costs, and trades can overlap sensibly. Realistically, both rooms together in a typical Swansea house lands somewhere between £13,000 and £25,000 for a solid mid range specification.
The most effective savings are structural, not cosmetic. Keeping the existing layout, and particularly keeping soil pipe and boiler positions, saves far more than downgrading taps. Spend on what you cannot change later: the waterproofing, the wiring, the extraction and the worktop. Handles, splashbacks and light fittings can be upgraded any time.
A like for like replacement usually does not, but new electrical circuits, a new window, structural openings and some drainage changes do. Your electrician should be Part P registered and issue a certificate either way.
Allow around two to three weeks for a bathroom and three to five weeks for a kitchen, or roughly five to seven weeks if both are done as one project. Old properties with unexpected repairs tend to add a week.
Usually because they are not the same job. Check whether the quote includes plastering, making good, waste removal, appliances, tiling labour and VAT, as these are the items most often left out of the lower numbers.