People ask me whether it is possible. It is. The question is whether anyone has thought through what comes after.
By Richard · 38 years bath repair, Edinburgh & Scotland
A bathroom fitter has quoted to replace the bath in your third-floor flat. The quote covers a new bath, a plumber and a day's labour. Here is what the quote does not cover.
A full-size Victorian cast iron bath is extremely heavy — heavy enough that it takes three people to move safely, and awkward enough that two of them will be doing it badly. It has no handles. It cannot be tipped in a narrow bathroom without hitting something.
Edinburgh's tenement stairs are stone, they turn tightly at every landing, and they are often original. The close is common property — it belongs to every proprietor in the stair, not just to you.
A dropped or dragged cast iron bath chips stone. It marks walls. And the cost of making good a shared stairwell, and the conversation with the factor and your neighbours that follows, is not on anyone's quote.
The tiles around a bath that has been in place for a century are bedded onto lime plaster, over lath, and they have moved with the building for a hundred years. They do not come off intact. They come off in fragments, along with the plaster behind them.
So you are now re-tiling. And a 1900s glaze — a soft, slightly uneven white with real depth to it — is not something you buy. You will be tiling the whole room in something modern, which is a different room from the one you bought.
Old waste runs and old feeds do not connect neatly to modern fittings. The pipework in a Victorian tenement was installed in stages by different hands over a century. Something will need cutting back into the wall or the floor.
A modern acrylic bath. It flexes when you stand in it. It loses heat in twenty minutes. It will look tired in a decade and need replacing in fifteen years.
You have removed a fixture that had already lasted a hundred years and would have lasted another hundred, and replaced it with something demonstrably worse, at a cost several times what resurfacing would have been, having damaged a shared stairwell and re-tiled a bathroom you did not want to re-tile.
I strip the surface back, fill the rust pitting, prime it and spray three to four coats of enamel. One person, one day, nothing leaves the room. The bath is usable the following morning. £350–£450 + VAT for a period cast iron bath.
I am obviously not a neutral party here. So take the neutral part: whatever you decide, get the removal quoted properly, including the stair, the tiles and the plumber, before you compare it to anything.
Where we work
Common questions
Can a cast iron bath be removed from a tenement flat?
Yes, with three people and proper equipment. The question is whether the stairwell damage, the re-tiling and the plumbing make it worth it against resurfacing in place.
Will removing a bath damage the tiles?
Almost certainly. Tiles bedded on lime plaster over lath, in place for a century, do not come away intact. Budget to re-tile the room.
Who is responsible for damage to a tenement stair?
You are, if your contractor causes it. The close is common property. Factors take a dim view, and so do neighbours.
No call-out charge anywhere in Edinburgh or the Lothians. Send a photo of the damage and we'll price it honestly.