Does it cost more to move the WC, basin and bath around?
The short answer
Yes, usually noticeably. Swapping fittings in the same positions is largely a fitting job. Moving them means new hot, cold and waste runs — and moving a WC means moving the soil pipe, which is the expensive one, because waste has to fall at the right gradient and that often means lifting floors or boxing in. What it costs also depends heavily on the age of your house: this is a much bigger job in a Victorian terrace than in a 1970s semi.
The cost isn't really in the new suite. It's in the pipework behind it, and in how far the waste has to travel.
A basin or a bath is comparatively forgiving: the waste pipe is small and there's more freedom about where it runs. A WC is the awkward one. The soil pipe is large, it has to fall at a sensible gradient to carry solids away, and it can't simply be threaded wherever suits the design. Move a toilet to the other side of the room and you may be lifting floorboards, notching joists or building a plinth to get the fall.
Which house you own matters more here than anywhere else on this site, and Macclesfield contains both extremes. On the post-war estates — Weston, Upton Priory, much of Tytherington — you're typically working with a modern soil stack, standard joists and a bathroom laid out the way bathrooms have been laid out since the sixties. Moving things is a normal job with a normal price.
The town centre is a different proposition. Over half the houses in central Macclesfield were built before 1919 — the silk-era workers' cottages and weavers' garrets, three storeys, solid walls, no cavity, and built hard up against the pavement. The soil pipe is usually strapped to the back wall because there was nowhere else for it to go, the joists are original and were never sized for a modern bathroom, and the "obvious" wall to move the loo to is frequently the one facing the street, where you can't run a soil pipe and often can't put a flue either. None of that makes the job impossible. It makes it a job worth pricing before you fall in love with a layout.
So get your plumber to look at the existing pipework first. It usually costs nothing to find out that one wall is dramatically cheaper than another — and in an older terrace, the difference between the cheap wall and the expensive one can be most of the budget.
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