Bathroom Renovations in Edge Hill

Edge Hill has one of the oldest and most consistent housing stocks in the city, and it changes how a bathroom renovation is priced and planned more than almost any other suburb we work in. The streets running up towards the Botanic Gardens and Whitfield Range are full of pre-war and immediate post-war timber homes, most of them highset, most of them with their original wet areas either still in place or replaced once, decades ago.

Raised floors make the expensive part cheap

The single most useful thing about renovating a bathroom in one of these houses is that the plumbing is reachable. In a highset timber home the drainage and supply runs sit under the floor in an accessible subfloor rather than buried in a concrete slab.

That matters because relocating a fixture is the change most people assume they cannot afford. On a slab, moving a toilet means cutting concrete, and the cost of that is often what forces a household to keep a layout they dislike. Here it is usually a matter of working from below, which means the room can genuinely be rearranged: the bath comes out, the shower moves to where it should have been, and the vanity finally sits somewhere that lets the door open properly.

If you have been told a layout change is not worth the money, and you are in a highset house, it is worth getting a second view.

What the age of the house brings with it

The trade-off is what is found on strip-out. In houses of this era we regularly meet a few things: a bathroom that was tiled directly over tongue and groove flooring at some point in the seventies, wall framing that has taken water at the bottom plate behind a long-suffering shower, and old galvanised or early copper supply lines that are perfectly serviceable until they are disturbed and then are not.

None of that is a disaster and all of it is normal for the age. It is simply the reason a quote for one of these houses should say plainly what happens if those things are present, rather than presenting a single number and dealing with the conversation later.

Termite history is worth mentioning too. In a timber house the wet area is where any past activity tends to show up, because that is where the moisture was.

Fitting a modern room into an old house

The other Edge Hill particular is proportion. These houses have high ceilings, wide architraves, VJ or wide-board linings and a certain robustness of detail, and a bathroom that ignores all of that reads as a showroom dropped into a Queenslander.

That does not mean a period reproduction, which usually looks like a theme. It means picking up the things the house already does: a taller skirting than a modern room would use, a door and architrave that match the rest of the hallway, and a tile scale that suits a room with a three metre ceiling rather than one designed for a two point four.

Access

The practical constraint is the street and the driveway. A lot of Edge Hill was subdivided before anybody was planning for a skip bin and a work vehicle, and several of the older blocks have a driveway that will take one or the other but not both. It is worth a look before the job is booked rather than on the first morning.

Call 0468 047 067 or send the form with a photo of the room as it stands.