Bathroom Renovations in Manunda

Manunda’s housing is largely post-war, built at a time when a bathroom was understood as a small functional room and nothing more. The original wet areas in these houses are often under three square metres, with a separate toilet in its own cubicle next door, and both rooms reached off the same short hallway. Most of what we do here starts with that arrangement.

Taking out the wall between them

The single most effective change available in this housing stock is combining the bathroom and the separate toilet into one room.

It sounds like a major structural undertaking and usually is not. The dividing wall between the two is very often non-structural, a stud partition put in to separate two rooms that were already sitting side by side in the wet area, sharing plumbing that runs in the same wall. Removing it produces a room of a workable size out of two that were each too small, and it does so without moving the house’s drainage connections much at all.

It has to be checked rather than assumed. Occasionally that wall is doing work, and where it is, there are other ways to get most of the benefit. But it is worth asking the question before accepting that a small bathroom has to stay small.

What is behind the linings

These houses are old enough that the strip-out matters, and there are a few things we expect to find.

The wall linings in wet areas of this period are frequently the original sheet material rather than a modern water-resistant board, and where a shower has been working on them for decades they will not be reusable. Framing at the bottom plate behind a long-standing shower is the other place to look, particularly in a timber-framed house. And the plumbing is often a patchwork: some original, some replaced in the seventies, some replaced last decade, in whatever material was current at the time.

None of this is unusual and none of it is a reason to avoid renovating. It is a reason to want a quote that says what happens if it is present, rather than one that stays silent and produces a variation in week two.

Renovating to a real budget

A lot of the work here is done by people who have owned the house a long time or by owners of modest investment properties, and the budget is a genuine constraint rather than a preference. That is a perfectly reasonable place to work from, and it changes what we recommend rather than how the job is built.

The order of priority we would argue for is consistent: the waterproofing and the falls first, because they are the only things that cannot be upgraded later without doing the room again; then the fixtures that get used every day; then the finishes. A bathroom with a sound membrane and plain white tiles is a good bathroom. A bathroom with beautiful tiles over a failing membrane is a bill arriving later.

A room that has to serve the whole house

In most of these homes it is the only bathroom, which makes the sequence as important as the finish. A household without a second bathroom cannot absorb a job that drifts.

That is worth planning around honestly at the quoting stage: what the realistic duration is, which days the room is genuinely out of use, and what temporary arrangements are worth setting up. We would rather agree that up front than have a family discover it in the first week.

Call 0468 047 067 or send a photo of the bathroom and the toilet through the form, and we will tell you whether the wall between them can come out.