Over a year ago, part of mum's kitchen ceiling started blistering - followed a few days later by water eventually penetrating it. The bathroom is directly above the leak.

Mum first of all checked her house insurance - if the leak was caused by "wear and tear" they won't pay. Anything damaged in investigating or accessing the source of the leak they won't pay. So mum decides to investigate herself. The most likely source is the toilet cistern - hidden behind a false wall. The false wall didn't have a removable panel, so the only way to access the cistern was by removing the worktop. Easier said than done - after removing the sealant, it turns out the walls were tiled after the worktop was installed, so several tiles were damaged in getting the worktop up (with a few hefty clouts from a mallet, as it had been mortared onto the frame of the false wall). Investigations with a torch failed to identify the source of the leak, so the section of false wall in front of the toilet had to be dismantled. The cause turned out to be the cistern filling up to the water inlet, and one of the washers having failed.

With the toilet now decommissioned (the house does have an en-suite and downstairs cloakroom, so there were two other toilets to use), mum started calling plumbers with a view to replacing the bathroom. Out of over a dozen plumbers contacted (including ones recommended by friends and ones on various registers / directories of 'good' tradespeople), only five actually bothered turning up to look at the bathroom, and only three gave a quote. Each made the job sound much longer and more complicated than need be (one claimed it would take 3 days to remove the bath, while another wanted to charge £600 each for removing the bath, basin and toilet - never mind installing new ones!) and the one mum eventually went with failed to show - eventually phoning up with the excuse he'd now been contracted on a big job. Generally, the attitude seemed to be that if the job would take less than a week or cost under £1,000, they weren't interested. Those that showed interest and quoted reasonably turned out to only be using her as a standby in case something bigger failed to materialise.

In the meantime, she's bought the new suite (currently occupying a spare room) and, with occasional weekend visits from either myself or my sister's boyfriend, the existing bathroom has been completely cleared and she's attempting to find a tiler to retile the bathroom. Although this time she's finding out how they'd do it - either tiling over the existing tiles, or remove and replace. It's a bit of a dilemma because if the existing tiles are very securely attached, trying to remove them could damage the underlying plasterboard wall. On the other hand, if they're not very securely attached and they're tiled over...

Needless to say, some have recommended remove and replace, others tile directly over, and one even suggested using an angle grinder to score the existing tiles before tiling over - which he then made more ominous by claiming that even putting towels etc. under the door wouldn't stop the dust invading the rest of the house. So evidently he didn't want the job...