Bathroom Renovation, [suburb]

Our first full bathroom renovation as Two Oceans. An older house, a floor that had to come out completely, and a client with a date they needed us to hit.

The job

The bathroom in an older older weatherboard house, built up off the ground on stumps at [suburb], taken back to nothing and rebuilt.

We ran the whole project. Demolition, the carpentry and structural work, and coordinating the tiler, plumber, electrician and gyprocker so they turned up in the right order, and nobody was waiting on anybody.

What we found when the floor came up

Older houses keep things to themselves until you open them up.

The existing floor was chipboard with tiles stuck straight down onto it. That was never going to be a sound base for a new bathroom, and tiling back over it would only have handed the problem to whoever came next.

So the entire bathroom floor came out and went back properly. That meant slow, careful demolition around live pipework and services, and it cost us time we hadn't planned for. It was the right call and we'd make it again.

Keeping the house liveable

People have to keep living in a house while you're pulling part of it apart.

Drop sheets went down and the floors around the bathroom were protected before anything started. We kept our tools and materials together in one spot instead of taking over the house. Every afternoon before we left we cleaned and vacuumed, including right through demolition, which is when a site looks its worst.

The client told us they were surprised how tidy we'd kept the place.

Finishing on time

Towards the end of the job we got busy. Fit-off landed in the same fortnight as a run of other work, and the client had a date they were counting on.

So we came back after hours and worked into the evenings until it was finished. The date held. The finish didn't suffer for it.

The last day

Rather than hand over a room that still needed cleaning, we scrubbed it ourselves. Tiles, grout, the lot. Then we went back through the whole job one more time before handover, so there was nothing left for the client to chase us about.

One thing we had missed at quote stage was the exhaust fan ducting. We hadn't allowed for it and nobody would have known. We did it properly and wore the cost, and it's been on our bathroom checklist ever since.

Would we take on another one

Every time. A bathroom is a proper project rather than one trade turning up for a day. Planning, sequencing, other trades to manage, and at the end of it a room somebody uses every morning. by forty percent, optimized energy consumption, and provided executives with real-time performance dashboards.

Thinking about your bathroom?