A Bathroom Furniture Pack Installation Guide

Your first job, when replacing bathroom furniture packs, is to shut off the water supply to your existing bathroom fittings: your basin, toilet, shower and bath, if all are being replaced. The water supply pipes may have individual shut off valves, or you may have to shut off the mains water supply to the whole house. It goes without saying that if you have to shut off your entire mains water supply, it will be helpful to ensure you have enough water on hand for cups of tea and hand washing throughout the day, and that you can either get the job completed in a day or you've made arrangements to accommodate (and bathe or shower!) the household elsewhere for the duration.

Installing your new bathroom furniture packs should be a fairly straightforward process. First of all, there's the removal of any existing bathroom furniture, to make way for the new. This is an unskilled job requiring only common sense, plenty of energy, and either a hired skip or a vehicle to transport the old items to the local tip.

Your bathroom furniture packs may well be delivered flat packed rather than fully assembled. If so, your first job will be assembly. Most flat pack items come complete with a full set of instructions for assembly (although some can be tricky to understand, so be patient!). Allow plenty of time for assembly - it will not help to rush the job.

If you're short of space in the bathroom, you could assemble some of your bathroom furniture packs elsewhere in the house and carry it through when you're ready to install it. You'll need someone to help you carry heavier items, and you should first check whether large pieces will fit through the bathroom door once they're fully assembled.

Once all your bathroom furniture packs has been assembled, you should assess the existing layout of the pipes in your bathroom. If your freestanding vanity unit or washstand is of a closed design, you will need to cut pipe holes to allow for plumbing pipe access. Your water supply and waste pipes will either come up from the floor of the bathroom or out from the wall. Measure carefully and cut only when you're sure, then sand down any rough edges.

You may also need to cut your washstand to accommodate the basin. A freestanding washstand designed to fit an inset or under counter basin should be supplied with the top already cut, but if you've bought a washstand with countertop basin, the top may have been left intact to give you the choice as to where exactly you want your basin and tap(s) to go.

Freestanding bathroom furniture is designed to look as though you could just pick it up and move it, but pieces to which there will be a water supply need to be fixed down: it could get messy if your washstand was knocked over and the water pipes bent and sprung a leak. Depending on the design of the washstand, you will be able to fix it either to a wall or to the floor - follow the manufacturer's instructions to ensure the piece is fixed down as securely as possible.