Bathroom Renovations in Redlynch

Redlynch Valley is where a very large number of Cairns families ended up between the mid nineties and the late 2000s, and the bathrooms built during that period are now all arriving at the same point at roughly the same time. Most of the work we do out here is on houses between twenty and thirty years old, on slabs, with an original main bathroom and an original ensuite that have never been touched.

The valley holds its moisture

Redlynch sits in a pocket with the range on one side, and anyone who lives here knows the valley stays damper and closer than the coast does. It is a pleasant thing in a garden and an unhelpful thing in a bathroom.

The practical effect is that a bathroom here gets less drying time than the same room would get a few kilometres away. Grout stays damp longer, silicone works harder, and a room that is under-ventilated never really recovers between uses. It is why so many houses out here have a bathroom that looks structurally fine and simply always smells slightly of damp.

Builder-grade extraction is the recurring fault

The single most common thing we correct in this suburb is the exhaust. Estate homes of this era were fitted with the smallest compliant fan available, and a great many of them discharge straight into the roof cavity rather than through to outside.

That arrangement removes moisture from the bathroom and delivers it into the roof space, where it condenses on the underside of the sheeting and works on the ceiling battens and insulation. In a valley that is already humid, the volume involved over twenty years is not trivial, and it is why we occasionally get called about a stained bathroom ceiling that turns out to have nothing to do with the roof.

Any renovation we do here includes extraction sized to the room and ducted to an external vent, on the shortest run the roof geometry allows. On a house of this age it is one of the highest value things in the whole scope, and it is close to invisible on a quote.

What twenty-five year old wet areas look like inside

The rest is fairly predictable for the era. Acrylic shower bases that have gone brittle and cracked around the waste. Framed shower screens whose rollers and bottom track have corroded. Laminate vanities with swollen carcass bases where water has sat under a leaking tap for years. And waterproofing which, depending on the year and the builder, is either a properly detailed membrane or a coat of something applied to the shower walls and nowhere else.

The good news is that these houses are straightforward to work in. The layouts are conventional, the framing is regular, and the wall linings come off cleanly. The constraint is the slab: moving a toilet is a concrete cutting job here, so most Redlynch renovations keep the fixture positions and spend the money on what goes in them instead.

Two rooms, one visit

Because so many of these houses have both a main bathroom and an ensuite of identical age, the question worth asking is whether to do them together. Where they share a wall, or where they share a run of plumbing, doing both at once is materially cheaper than doing them two years apart, and it avoids the situation where a household is left with the older room as its only bathroom while the other is being redone.

Call 0468 047 067 or send photos of both rooms through the form, and we will tell you whether they are worth combining.