Seven stages, and you are never the project manager.

Some people ring with a showroom design already drawn and a delivery date agreed. Others ring with a kitchen they have stopped liking and no vocabulary for why. Both are fine starting points, and the first conversation treats them the same way: who uses the room and when, what annoys you about it now, and what would have to change for you to stop thinking about it.

Ten minutes on the phone will usually tell you whether what you have in mind is straightforward, possible with some building work behind it, or not worth doing. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

Before anything is priced, we come and look at the actual room: dimensions and squareness, ceiling height and any slope, window and door swings, the position of the soil stack, the direction and condition of the joists, the floor build-up available, where the consumer unit is, and what the incoming water will genuinely deliver.

It is also where we work out which walls are structural and what the house will allow. Whether a WC can move to the opposite wall or a kitchen can open into the dining room is not a matter of taste — it is a matter of fall, stack position, joists and what is holding the first floor up. That gets answered here rather than discovered halfway through.

A lot of our work arrives through bathroom showrooms and kitchen suppliers we have dealt with for years: you choose the room with them, and we install it. Just as many customers bring a plan of their own, a supplier drawing, or a rough sketch on the back of an envelope. All of it is workable.

What we add is the reality check. Showroom designs are drawn from measurements and a plan, not from your soil stack — so if a drawing and a building disagree, we will say so plainly before the order goes in rather than three weeks into the job.

Once the layout is settled it becomes a written scope: what comes out, what goes in, what building work is involved, who is doing the notifiable gas and electrical work, and a programme with a start date. You get a proper figure at this point — after the survey and the design, which is the only stage at which a figure means anything.

Lead times on units, stone, worktops and brassware are checked before the start date is fixed. A job that stalls for a fortnight waiting on one item is nearly always a job that was started before somebody checked.

The old room comes out and goes away. If the layout is moving, the structural work happens now — openings formed, walls removed or built, a new window or Velux cut in where the room needs the light. Then pipework and wiring are reworked to suit the signed-off design rather than to suit where 1987 left them.

Everything that will end up behind a tile or a unit 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 afterwards. Plastering and making-good happen here too, because on a renovation the plaster is usually what ties the new work to the old house.

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.

Units, worktops, suite, screens, brassware, appliances and lighting go in, everything is run and checked, the site is cleaned properly, and you get a walk round where you are invited to be fussy. Anything that goes on the list gets dealt with.

And then the part customers keep writing about in public: the team is polite, you are kept updated, and the house is left tidy. If something surfaces afterwards you ring the same number you rang at the start — not a call centre, and not a subcontractor who has moved on to somebody else’s house.