Small bathrooms and powder rooms
Small bathroom renovations and powder room conversions in Narre Warren 3805, including the separate hallway toilet found in most 1970s and 1980s brick veneer.
A small bathroom costs less than a large one without being a simpler job. Every service still has to fit, and the room holds one trade at a time, so the program runs over much the same number of days. The saving comes out of tiling area rather than labour.
The separate hallway toilet
The most common compact wet area job here is the separate toilet off the hallway. It is in almost every house through the 1970s and 1980s brick veneer belt, which is the deepest pool of ageing stock anywhere in the City of Casey. The layout is a three bedroom single storey home with one bathroom and that toilet beside it, both opening off the same hall. The room runs about 900 mm wide by 1500 mm long, tiled to roughly 1200 mm in the same almond, avocado or pink tile as the bathroom, with a close coupled suite, a small hand basin if there is one at all, and a fan that discharges into the roof space.
Three things can sensibly be done with that room.
- Renovate it as a powder room. New floor and wall tiling, a compact vanity or a wall hung basin, a new suite, a fan ducted to outside air, lighting and a door. The plumbing stays put.
- Take out the wall between the toilet and the bathroom and make one larger bathroom. This comes up constantly in the older stock, because it turns a cramped bathroom into a room that will take a proper shower and a double vanity. The dividing wall is usually non loadbearing, which has to be confirmed rather than assumed.
- Leave the toilet alone and renovate the bathroom only. Worth considering where the household has one bathroom and needs a working toilet through the build.
Knocking that dividing wall out is the decision that changes the paperwork, and what the law requires explains why option 2 gets a different answer from the other two.
Small main bathrooms
The other compact job is the original main bathroom in the same houses, usually around 2.0 by 2.4 metres, with a 900 by 900 fibreglass shower base dropped into the corner, a steel bath along one wall and a single laminate top vanity. That stock is 40 to 50 years old now, so a bathroom of this vintage is quoted on the basis that the membrane has gone rather than on the hope that it has not.
Sheeting behind the tiles in this vintage is sampled and cleared before demolition, and the result is priced into the quote rather than added to it afterwards.
Making a small room work
| Choice | What it buys | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Wall hung vanity | Visible floor, easier cleaning | Needs framing behind the sheet, set at rough in |
| In wall cistern | Around 200 mm of room length | Needs a deeper stud wall, decided before rough in |
| Shower over bath | Keeps a bath in a small room | Cramped to use and the screen options are limited |
| Remove the bath | A proper shower and more floor | Can matter for resale in a one bathroom house |
| Flush entry shower | Room reads larger, no hob to step over | Floor falls and membrane detail have to be exact |
| Sliding screen door | No door swing eating the room | More frame and more track to clean |
In a one bathroom house the bath question deserves the longest thought. The older streets around Westfield Fountain Gate carry a high investor and rental share, and for a rental the brief is usually compliance and durability rather than finish: a hard wearing floor tile, a shower that will not leak, a fan that actually vents outside, and a suite and tapware that can be replaced off the shelf in ten years.
Where the money goes in a small room
Fixed costs do not shrink with the room. Demolition, clearance work where it applies, plumbing rough in, waterproofing, the fan, the certificates and the fit off labour are much the same whether the floor is 3 square metres or 8. Tile quantity and tiling labour are what shrink, at $90 to $190 per m2 for the floor.
A small or budget full bathroom generally lands at $10,500 to $21,000. A separate toilet or powder room renovated on its own runs $6,000 to $14,000. A vanity supplied and installed sits at $500 to $3,700. Combining the two rooms into one larger bathroom is quoted as a full bathroom renovation with the wall work added on top.
What goes wrong
Tile size chosen for the showroom rather than the room. A large format tile in a 900 mm wide space means cuts down both walls, a lot of waste, and a harder job building the floor falls.
The fan left alone. Where the existing fan ducts into the roof cavity, reusing it keeps the sweating ceiling that came with it.
No allowance for access. A hallway toilet door is often 720 mm and the hall outside it is narrow, so the vanity and the suite have to physically fit through. That gets checked at measure.
Ordering after demolition. A small room finishes fast once trades are in it, and a special order tile on back order leaves the house without a toilet for far longer than the work itself needed.
A powder room done on its own
A powder room is the shortest wet area job we quote, and it is often the one people do first because it proves how a builder works before the main bathroom goes out of service. The sequence is compressed: strip out in a morning, plumbing and electrical rough in the same day where nothing moves, sheet and screed, membrane and cure, then tile, fit off and clean.
Two things decide whether it stays short. The first is the basin. A wall hung basin needs framing behind the sheet and the waste set at the right height before the wall closes, so it has to be chosen before demolition rather than during it. The second is the door. Many of these rooms have an inward swinging 720 mm door that will not clear a vanity, and changing it to an outward swing or a slider is a framing job, not a fit off job.
Where the laundry is being done in the same visit, which is often the cheaper way to do both, see laundry renovations. Put the room dimensions in the quote form along with the age of the house.