Inner West Bathroom Renovations for Terraces, Semis and Units

Old houses, narrow rooms, shared walls

The Inner West was built long before anyone expected a house to have two bathrooms. Most of its terraces and cottages went up between the 1870s and the 1920s with an outside toilet and a laundry copper, and the bathroom arrived later — often as a skillion-roofed lean-to added to the rear wing some time between the 1940s and the 1970s.

That history shapes nearly every renovation we price here. The brief is rarely "make it look nicer". It is closer to: make an afterthought of a room into something that is dry, warm, properly ventilated and still fits through the kitchen.

What changes the job in this part of Sydney:

• The floor may be timber on piers, not concrete. It flexes, it may be out of level by 30mm across a small room, and it has to be stiffened before any membrane goes down.
• The walls are rarely square. Double brick, rendered and painted many times, with a party wall to one side that belongs as much to your neighbour as to you.
• Access is tight. Materials come through the front door and down the hall, or through a rear lane if you are lucky, and the skip may need a council permit to sit on the street.
• The linings may contain asbestos. Fibro sheeting on lean-tos and older wet-area board are common enough that testing comes before demolition in any pre-1990 house.

The services

We arrange seven kinds of wet-area work and nothing outside that:

• Full bathroom renovations, including lean-to rebuilds
• Ensuites added to an upstairs rear wing or attic
• Small bathrooms in narrow terraces and walk-up units
• Laundry renovations, on their own or combined with the bathroom
• Waterproofing over timber and uneven substrates
• Tiling with set-outs that disguise walls that were never straight
• Vanities and storage sized for long, thin rooms

The lean-to question

If your bathroom sits at the back of the house, down a step from the kitchen, with a sloping ceiling and a window that fogs every morning, you have a lean-to bathroom. Thousands of Inner West houses do.

Some are sound and only need a new fit-out. Others have rotted bearers, a roof that pools water at the flashing, or walls of fibro over a timber frame that has been wet for decades. The honest way to tell is to lift a floor tile at the measure or look under the house through a vent, not to guess from photographs.

When the structure is fine, the room is renovated like any other — strip-out, rough-in, sheeting, membrane, tile, fit-off. When it is not, the floor frame, wall frame or roof sheeting are replaced as part of the job, and the quote shows that work as its own line so you can see where the money goes. The cost page sets out both bands.

Heritage without the drama

Large parts of Marrickville, Leichhardt, Newtown, Balmain, Rozelle, Ashfield and Dulwich Hill fall inside heritage conservation areas. That sounds more restrictive for a bathroom than it usually is.

Work that stays inside the existing room and does not change the outside of the house is, in most cases, exempt development. Replacing a window that faces the street, raising a lean-to roof, or pushing the room out into the yard is a different matter and generally needs consent. A house that is individually listed as a heritage item carries tighter rules again.

We flag which category a job falls into at the measure, so nobody discovers it after demolition. The decision itself belongs to Inner West Council — or, for Five Dock and Drummoyne, the City of Canada Bay.

Inside the room there is plenty of scope for a finish that suits the house: encaustic-pattern floors, subway or handmade-look wall tiles, a freestanding bath where the room allows, and tapware in brushed nickel or aged brass rather than whatever was on special.

Units are a separate conversation

The red-brick walk-up blocks of the 1960s and 1970s are everywhere from Ashfield to Marrickville. Their bathrooms are small, often with a bath-shower over a tiled hob and a concrete slab underneath that belongs to the owners corporation.

Renovating one means strata approval before work starts, by-law conditions on working hours and on carrying everything up a stairwell with no lift, and a membrane that protects the unit below. It is a well-worn path, but it adds weeks at the front of the program. The small bathrooms page covers it in detail.

Where we work

Marrickville, Leichhardt, Newtown and Enmore, Balmain and Rozelle, Ashfield and Five Dock, plus Dulwich Hill, Petersham, Stanmore, Annandale, Lilyfield, Summer Hill, Haberfield and Drummoyne.

Money and paperwork

In NSW, the deposit on residential building work cannot exceed 10 per cent of the contract price. For work over $20,000, home building compensation cover must be in place before a deposit is requested — ask to see the certificate.

Renovation work arranged through this site is carried out in partnership with Coastal Renovation Group, a licensed NSW builder. Licence and insurance details are provided on request, and you can check them yourself on the NSW Fair Trading register.

This is a new website. We have no reviews to show, and we have not made any up. The process page explains how a job runs from measure to handover.

Call 02 5950 5195 or send the room details through.