Almost every homeowner asks this before the first tile comes off the wall, and the honest answer is longer than a week but rarely as long as people fear. A standard full bathroom refit in a Hull home usually runs to 10 to 15 working days on site. Here is what those days are actually spent doing, and what tends to stretch them.
For a typical single family bathroom, stripped back to bare walls and refitted with a new suite, tiling and flooring, expect around 10 to 15 working days. A small downstairs cloakroom or a straight swap of like for like might be done in 5 to 7 days. Once you start moving the soil pipe, converting to a wet room, or knocking through into an airing cupboard, you are realistically looking at three to four weeks.
It is worth understanding why it is not simply a matter of labour hours. A fair chunk of the programme is waiting: plaster needs to dry, tile adhesive needs to cure before grouting, and tanking in a shower area needs its full curing time before anything goes on top of it. Rushing those stages is how you end up with cracked grout and lifting tiles a year later.
Every job differs, but a fairly standard fortnight looks something like this.
Local housing stock has a real bearing on timings. In the older terraces around the Avenues, Newland and Beverley Road, lath and plaster walls and very uneven solid brick often mean battening and boarding rather than simply retiling, which can add two or three days. Solid external walls also make chasing for pipework slower than in a modern cavity built semi.
The other common surprises are found on strip out day: rotten floorboards or joist ends under an old bath, redundant lead or steel pipework, and waste runs that were never quite right. Moving the toilet more than a short distance from the existing soil stack is the single biggest timeline changer, because it often means new fall on the waste and sometimes external work.
Materials matter too. Off the shelf suites from a local merchant are usually available within days, but bespoke shower screens, stone resin trays in non standard sizes and specific tile ranges can carry lead times of two to six weeks. If you have no driveway and need a skip on the street, you will also need a permit from Hull City Council, which takes a few working days to come through.
The jobs that overrun are almost always the ones where decisions were still being made after work started. Everything you can settle before day one buys you time later.
One more local note: water across East Yorkshire is drawn largely from the chalk aquifer and is hard, so limescale is a genuine factor. Choosing a shower and taps with easy clean or rub clean fittings will not shorten the build, but it will save you hours over the years that follow.
Most households do, and we would normally aim to keep a working toilet available for all but one or two days of the job. If it is your only bathroom, plan for around a fortnight without a usable shower and arrange somewhere to wash.
New electrical circuits in a bathroom are notifiable under Part P, and adding mechanical ventilation or altering drainage also falls under building regulations. A registered installer can self certify the electrics, otherwise the work needs notifying to Hull City Council building control.
The physical work could be squeezed, but plaster, tanking membranes, adhesive and grout all need curing time, and each stage has to be dry before the next begins. Skipping that drying time is the most common cause of failed tiling and damp problems later on.