Hey, thanks a lot guys, plenty to go on there - unlike the cops who had their toilet stolen.

Do I pick up a hint of bitter experience in the comments about 'the lady of the house'? Fortunately, I think we live in an age where bathroom suites are any colour as long as it's white, so I don't anticipate any problems there. Mind you, her favourite colour is a strange, dull, dark shade of blue...

Seriously - most grateful for all these suggestions, I've read them all with great interest and learned heaps. You want a progress report?

By the way, are there any neat and tidy ways of concealing pipes? Other than the usual boxing, which I think often looks unsightly. The pipe concerned (the cold water feed for the electric shower unit) runs vertically up the middle of a wall and has a shut-off valve half way up it - one of those wheel-type taps, I don't know what the proper name for them is.

Number 6, the reason the washer and dryer are in the kitchen is because our houses are too damn small! If my washer wasn't in the kitchen, the only other place it could go would be outside in the street. And this being Manchester, I just hang my clothes out in the rain to dry.