Bathrooms and kitchens, managed end to end

Bathrooms and kitchens carry a property's rental value and its sale price, and they are the rooms where poor workmanship is most visible. GEM manages these projects end to end: design, supply, strip-out, first fix, tiling, second fix and snagging. One team, one programme, one point of accountability.

How a refurbishment actually runs

A straightforward like-for-like bathroom typically runs one to two weeks on site; kitchens similar; wet rooms and layout changes longer. You receive a programme with the quotation and we report progress against it, so nobody is guessing when the tiler arrives or when water goes back on. Plumbing, electrics and ventilation are coordinated inside the one programme, which is the difference between a fortnight of sequenced trades and a month of missed handovers.

Specifying for tenants, not showrooms

For landlords we specify finishes that photograph well and wear well: durable surfaces, sensible ventilation, accessible isolation and services routed so future maintenance does not mean opening walls. Fittings can come through our trade accounts, which is usually cheaper, or we install sanitaryware and kitchens you have chosen once we have verified the specification.

Extraction is the specification decision tenancies live with. An undersized or noisy extractor gets switched off, condensation follows, and eighteen months later the deposit dispute is about mould that a quieter fan with an overrun timer would have prevented. We size extraction to the room and duct it to outside air, never into a loft.

Wet rooms and where cheap ones fail

Wet rooms fail at the tanking and the falls, almost never at the tiles you can see. We tank the full wet zone, form drainage falls in the screed rather than relying on a tray former alone, and pressure-test before a single tile goes on. It is slower, it is invisible in the finished room, and it is why our wet rooms do not come back as leak claims two winters later. In upper-floor flats we treat the tanking as non-negotiable, because the flat below belongs to someone with a solicitor.

Working around tenancies

Projects are programmed around tenancies where needed, with clear milestones and staged invoicing agreed before work begins. Give us the void window and we build the programme backwards from the new tenancy start date, finishing with a professional clean so marketing photography can happen the day after handover. Materials are ordered and checked before strip-out starts, because a missing shower tray discovered on day four is how void programmes die.