Seven stages, and you are never the project manager.

Some people arrive with a folder of saved images and a fixed idea. Others arrive with a room they have simply stopped liking and no vocabulary for why. Both are fine starting points, and the first meeting treats them the same way: we talk about who uses the bathroom and when, what currently annoys you about it, and what would have to change for you to stop thinking about it.

This can happen at the Farnham studio or at your house. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing — and by the end of it you will have an honest early view on whether what you have in mind is possible in that room.

Before anything is drawn, the room is measured properly: dimensions and squareness, ceiling height and any slope, window and door swings, the position of the soil stack, the direction of the joists, the floor build-up available, and what the incoming water will actually deliver.

This is the stage where thirty years of plumbing pays for itself. Whether the WC can move to the opposite wall is not a matter of taste — it is a matter of fall, stack position and joist direction, and it is answered here rather than discovered halfway through the job.

Our designers work in computer-aided design to produce photorealistic images of the bathroom as it will be built. Layout options are drawn to scale. Tile, vanity, brassware, screen and lighting are dropped in and viewed from the angles you will actually stand at.

The point is not the picture — it is that decisions get made while they are still free to change. A bath that dominates the room, a large-format tile that shrinks it, a mirror lit from the wrong side: all obvious in a render, all expensive to discover on site.

Once the design is right, it becomes a specification: every item listed, the scope of works written down, and a programme for the installation. You get a proper figure at this point — after the room has been surveyed and the design fixed, which is the only stage at which a figure means anything.

Lead times on furniture, stone and brassware are checked before the start date is set. Ordering a bathroom and then waiting for one item to arrive is the commonest reason a project drags, and it is almost always avoidable at this desk.

The old suite comes out and goes away. Pipework and wiring are reworked to suit the signed-off layout — most often taken out of the floor and run in the wall — so that the radiator, WC, basin and shower sit where the design wants them rather than where 1987 left them.

Everything that will end up behind a tile is tested while it is still reachable. The cheapest moment to find a weeping joint is before it disappears under twelve millimetres of porcelain.

Walls are boarded and floors levelled, wet areas are tanked, and underfloor heating — where it is going in — is laid, meter-tested before it is covered and tested again after. Only then does tiling start, and it starts dry: centre lines found, cuts balanced, bond decided before any adhesive is mixed.

Internal corners and the joint where tile meets bath or tray are siliconed rather than grouted, because those joints move and grout cracks when asked to flex. It is a small detail that separates a bathroom that ages well from one that does not.

Suite, vanity, screen, brassware, mirror and lighting go in, everything is run and checked, the room is cleaned, and you are shown how it all works — including the things people usually find out by accident, like which isolator does what.

Then the part our reviewers write about: if anything surfaces later, you ring the person who designed the room. One client's public review describes us going back, tracing a leak stain on a ceiling to its actual cause and fixing that rather than the symptom. That is the standard we would like every project to end at.