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Bathroom renovation

The bathroom questions Cypriot homeowners ask before they commit

What a bathroom refit really costs in Cyprus, why two quotes for the same room differ by thousands, and what to check before you sign.

7 min read

Bathroom Renovation in Cyprus: Common Questions — illustrasjonsbilde

Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

ByStavros Loizou· Editor, kitchens, bathrooms and finishes

Stavros covers the rooms that carry the most cost per square metre and the finishes that go into them. He tracks the order trades have to arrive in, which moves a Cypriot renovation bill further than any hourly rate does.

Published

A full bathroom in Cyprus runs from roughly €3,500 to €9,500 per room, strip-out to finished, with the median near €5,800 for a standard three-piece. That is a wide band for the smallest room in the house, and almost none of the spread is the taps. It is whether the drainage moves, whether the room gets tanked properly, and how much of the building has to be opened up to reach the pipework.

The ten questions that come up most

Roughly in the order they arrive in a first conversation with a contractor.

  1. Why does such a small room cost that much?
  2. Can I keep the layout and only change what shows?
  3. What happens if I move the WC?
  4. How long are we without the bathroom?
  5. What is tanking, and do I actually need it?
  6. Does anybody have to give me permission?
  7. Can one person do the whole job?
  8. Where does the hot water come from, and does that change anything?
  9. Is it cheaper to do two bathrooms at once?
  10. Why is one quote thousands lower than the others?

Short answers

Why it costs that much. Every trade in the house turns up in a bathroom, in a space where none of them can work at the same time. Strip-out, plumbing first fix, electrical first fix, tanking, tiling, plumbing second fix, electrical second fix, glazing, decorating — nine visits in a fixed order, most of them a day or less. You pay for the sequence, not the square metres.

Keeping the layout. The single biggest saving available. Same positions for WC, basin and shower means the waste pipework stays put, the walls stay closed, and the job is a refit rather than a small construction project.

Moving the WC. A soil pipe needs a fall, so relocating a pan usually means building the floor up to run the new waste — which changes the threshold, which changes the door. On a ground floor slab it can mean breaking concrete instead. Decide it in the first ten minutes, not in week two.

How long. Two to three weeks on site for a full strip-out and refit. The room stands empty between trades more than it is worked in, which is why the programme does not shrink much for a smaller bathroom.

Tanking. The waterproof layer applied to the wet zone before any tile goes on. Tiles and grout are not waterproof; the layer behind them is. It is invisible once finished, the cheapest thing in the room to leave out, and the most common reason a Cypriot bathroom gets rebuilt twice.

Permission. Replacing a bathroom in the same layout inside your own home is maintenance rather than development, so planning permission does not apply. The municipality and the building do: a skip on a public road generally needs municipal permission, most blocks set working hours and rules about using the lift for debris, and anything touching a shared soil stack involves the management committee.

One person doing it all. A capable bathroom fitter can cover strip-out, tiling and second fix. The electrical work cannot be self-declared — it needs a certified electrician, priced in the region of €32 to €65 per hour for labour, and the certificate matters again when the property is sold.

Hot water. Most Cypriot bathrooms run off a thermosiphon cylinder on the roof. If you are moving to a thermostatic shower or adding an outlet, the available pressure and the mixing valve are part of the job. A refit that ignores the cylinder produces a complaint about the shower shortly after handover.

Two bathrooms at once. Cheaper per room — one strip-out, one set of deliveries, one skip — but longer overall, and it removes your fallback.

The low quote. Almost always a smaller scope rather than a cheaper contractor. Read what is missing before you read the total.

Where the answer depends

The drainage

Everything begins with where the waste runs. In a house on a slab the pipework is buried, so moving anything is concrete work. In a flat the bathroom is tied to a shared stack, and how far your new position sits from that stack decides whether the floor has to come up. A contractor who asks to see the stack before quoting is doing the right thing; one who prices a layout change from a photograph is guessing, and the guess arrives later as a variation.

The building

Nicosia's older suburbs are full of 1970s to 1990s blocks — Strovolos is the clearest example — where rewiring and replumbing dominate renovation work because the original installations have reached the end of their life. Opening the walls for a bathroom is the sensible moment to replace the pipework serving it: replumbing is quoted around €40 to €100 per square metre, and doing it while the tiles are off costs far less than doing it after a failure. Ask before you sign where the skip goes and who protects the lift and the common stairs.

Where you are on the island

Specification should change with the postcode. Along exposed coastal frontage — Kato Paphos is the clearest case — the air is salt-laden and galvanised or marine-grade fixings are standard. Chrome brassware pits, screen rollers corrode and mirror backing lifts at the edges, so the coastal version of this job spends more on fittings and extraction and less on decorative finishes. Inland, the widest temperature range on the island argues for movement joints and a flexible adhesive in a large tiled area. Our district and town pages exist because those differences hold consistently.

The season

Adhesive skins over fast in July and August, which is why tilers start early and stop early, and levelling compounds dry slowly through a humid coastal winter. Contractors are busiest in the weeks either side of winter, when several households discover the same leak at once — a bathroom booked in September is a scheduled job, the same bathroom in January is whatever is available.

What nobody asks but should

Where does the extraction discharge? Plenty of bathrooms in Cypriot blocks vent into a ceiling void or an internal light well, which moves humidity around the building rather than out of it. Ask where the duct terminates: it decides whether you get black spotting above the screen in February.

Which way does the floor fall? In a wet room or a level-access shower the falls are the drainage. They are set before tiling and cannot be corrected afterwards without lifting the floor. Ask to see them before the tiler starts.

Is the tiling quoted on the right basis? Tiling runs about €18 to €48 per square metre for standard format on a prepared substrate. Large format needs a flatter substrate, so it drags preparation work behind it; small mosaic is slower to lay. Two quotes using different formats are not comparable totals.

Who supplies the sanitaryware? Client-supplied fittings are common here and perfectly workable, but they move the risk of a wrong item or a long lead time onto you. Get it written down either way, and order a spare box of tile — batches vary and ranges are discontinued.

Who is actually on site? The person who quotes and the person who tiles are often not the same. Ask who will be doing the work, and get three quotes rather than two so the middle one has something to sit between.

Common questions

What has to be in a bathroom quote for it to be comparable?

Strip-out and disposal, tanking to the wet area, tile format and area with adhesive and grout specified, sanitaryware and brassware itemised by model, extraction, the electrical certificate, silicone and making good, and the number of working days. Three quotes written that way can be compared. Three totals cannot.

Can we stay in the house while the bathroom is done?

Usually yes, if there is a second WC. With one bathroom, two to three weeks without it is the honest figure, and the alternative is splitting the work so the WC returns to service mid-programme — which costs more and stretches the dates.

Is it worth replumbing while the walls are open?

In older stock, generally yes. Replacing failing sections one at a time in a flat still running on its original installation costs more over a decade than doing the room properly once. In a recently built or replumbed property, no.

Does a coastal bathroom really need different fittings?

It needs better extraction and better-grade fixings and brassware. Salt air attacks moving parts and plated finishes first, and the failure shows up several years in rather than immediately — which is why it gets left out.

Who should I be asking for quotes?

Bathroom specialists working in your district, on the type of building you have; apartment work and detached-house work are different problems. Our bathroom renovation section sets out what the job involves, the project index covers the trades around it, and the district listings show who works in your area.

Bathroom specialists in Cyprus

8 companies covering this area.

Sources

  1. Cyprus Statistical Service — construction cost indices — retrieved 2026-07-28
  2. Cyprus Scientific and Technical Chamber (ETEK) — registered engineers and technical practice — retrieved 2026-07-28

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