Small bathroom renovations in Sydney

Around 1.5m × 2.5m, or roughly 5m² and under. That is the standard footprint in most Sydney units and apartments, and in the original bathrooms of a lot of older houses.

According to the 2021 Census, more than 21% of NSW dwellings are apartments, the highest proportion of any state, so well over a million Sydney residents live with a bathroom around this size.

Between $26,500 and $46,000 including GST for labour, for a room up to about 5m². Products and fixtures are extra, and we supply them at our trade cost, which can save up to 30 percent against retail.

Keeping the plumbing where it is puts you at the lower end. Moving the toilet, or converting a shower-over-bath into a walk-in shower, moves you up the range. That figure covers a complete room: demolition, waterproofing, tiling, fixture installation and painting, delivered as a fixed-price written quote.

If your budget for the whole job is under $20,000 we are not the right fit, and we will tell you that on the phone rather than after a site visit.

Because the cost is labour and compliance, not floor area.

A 5m² room needs the same project management, the same demolition, the same rubbish removal, the same curing time for screed and waterproofing, and the same number of waterproofing visits — floor, walls, grout, silicone. The same licensed plumber, electrician, waterproofer and tiler each attend and each charge for their time regardless of how big the room is.

You do use fewer tiles. But that saving is often cancelled out by the extra time it takes to work in a confined space, because two trades cannot work at once in a room that size.

Yes. The bathroom is one of the highest-impact rooms for both daily life and resale value, and in a small room a fixture budget goes considerably further because you are buying less of everything.

The bigger return in a compact room comes from layout decisions rather than expensive fittings. Getting the set-out right is what makes a small bathroom feel generous.

Often, yes. We can take space from an adjoining hallway, bedroom, linen cupboard or laundry, or convert a laundry into a combined bathroom and laundry.

It depends on which walls are structural, which we assess on site. We visit your home, work out which walls can be moved, adjusted or removed, and include it in your free quote before you commit to anything. Removing a wall runs $5,500 to $11,000 including GST.

It can be done and we have done it. The trick is a compact 1400mm bath and rethinking the vanity wall so the bath is not competing with the basin for the same run of floor.

Whether it works in your room depends on the door swing, the window position and where the floor waste sits. We will tell you honestly at the quote stage if it will make the room feel cramped rather than luxurious.

The other question worth asking is whether you want the bath at all. In most small Sydney bathrooms it is the largest consumer of floor area and the least used fixture in the house, and removing it for a walk-in shower typically returns about a third of the usable floor.

The ones that free up visible floor and remove obstructions:

• Wall-hung vanities and toilets, so you see more floor
• A frameless fixed panel instead of a hinged shower door, which removes the swing clearance — usually the single biggest space win
• A wall niche for bottles instead of shelving that projects into the room
• Floor-to-ceiling tiling for an unbroken surface
• A sliding cavity door instead of one that swings inward, which recovers about a square metre of floor
• A larger window, skylight or glass brick wall for natural light
• A slimline ceiling fan sitting flush with the ceiling

Generally yes, because fewer grout lines read as a more continuous surface. Running the floor tile through into the shower without a hob does the same thing, and in a long narrow room laying the tile the short way widens it visually.

Large tiles need a straighter wall behind them and produce more offcut waste in a small room, so the saving on tiling labour is smaller than you would expect. That is why the walls are checked and packed straight before a single tile goes up.

14 to 28 days, with most finished around 21. A small room is not meaningfully faster than a large one.

The time is not spent laying tiles, it is spent waiting. Screed, render and waterproofing membranes have manufacturer-specified cure times that cannot be compressed, and your custom shower screen can only be measured once the tiling is finished, then it has to be made.

No, and we would be cautious of anyone who says yes.

Waterproofing cure times and the trade sequence cannot be shortened, no matter how small the room. A five-day job is a cosmetic refresh — new tapware, a new vanity, fresh paint — not a renovation. A genuine strip-out and rebuild takes 14 days at the very fastest, and most take around three weeks.

Usually, and in a compact room it is often the change that makes the biggest difference. It depends on where the drainage runs and whether you are on a slab or a timber floor.

Changing the plumbing location costs $1,100 to $3,300 including GST in a timber frame, or $1,100 to $4,400 in concrete, because on a slab it means cutting and rerouting rather than working under the floor. We check this at the quote stage so the cost is known before you commit.

We can, but we recommend against it, and we will explain why before you decide.

Tiling over old tiles means building on top of old waterproofing with no way to know how much life it has left, and no way to guarantee against a future leak. The adhesion methods used are also unreliable: a primed surface may hold for months, but tiles laid this way commonly crack or detach over time.

In a small upstairs bathroom or an apartment, that is somebody else's ceiling. Stripping back to the substrate and re-waterproofing costs more upfront, but it is the only way we can stand behind the work.

Waterproofing is built into every bathroom we do, never treated as an optional line item, and it matters most in a compact room where the falls run over a very short distance and there is no margin for error.

We install a complete system built to AS 3740:2021, the current Australian Standard for waterproofing of domestic wet areas, developed over years of trial and error. It is a two-layer membrane applied directly to the subfloor, left to cure before the sand and cement bedding goes down, then a further membrane layer on top of the bedding — a sandwich rather than a single coat.

The work is carried out by a licensed waterproofer, and we photograph the finished membrane before any tiling goes down so there is a clear record. On completion you receive a certificate of compliance and the photographs for your own files.

There are three options: a ceiling-mounted heat, fan and light unit, electric underfloor heating, or in-wall heating behind the tiles.

Rick's honest take for a small room is the heated towel rail. You get a warm towel after every shower and it keeps towels dry between uses, which genuinely helps with moisture and mould in a compact space. Underfloor heating feels luxurious, but in a room with only a couple of square metres of exposed floor you are paying a lot for a small area of warmth.

A heated towel rail runs $550 to $1,100 including GST. Underfloor heating with a new circuit runs $1,650 to $3,850.

Usually yes, and we will always do our best to conceal the pipework inside the wall. It is worth doing, because a wall-hung vanity with the floor running underneath is one of the most effective ways to make a small room read as larger.

In some situations the pipe cannot be moved. A single-skin brick wall or undersized piping can both prevent it, and single-skin walls are common in older Sydney homes and unit blocks. We assess this during your on-site quote and anything affecting the outcome is listed on your written quotation, so there are no surprises on handover day.

Two parts of your bathroom are invisible until the room is stripped: what is underneath the floor, and what is inside the walls. You cannot see through a tiled floor or a tiled wall. Neither can we, and neither can anyone who quotes you.

Small bathrooms in older Sydney homes very often hide soft sheeting around the old shower base, because a shower in a compact room is doing more work in a smaller area. What we find ranges from nothing at all, to one soft sheet, to bearers and joists that have been quietly wet for a decade.

If we open the room and the structure is sound, we prepare it and carry on. If it is not, we stop. We photograph what we have found, we show it to you, we set out the options and what each one costs, and you decide before anybody picks up another tool. What we will not do is tile over it.

Yes. The room is out of action for the full construction period.

Small bathrooms are more often the only bathroom in the home, so tell us at the quote stage if that is your situation. We can sequence the work so the toilet is reconnected as early as possible, and plan the tiling and waterproofing window around you. Most clients stay living at home throughout — your water and power stay connected, only the bathroom is unusable.

No. Your quote is a fixed price, and it includes allowances for the common unknowns we have met since 2009.

The things genuinely outside it are council or strata application fees, asbestos (which is only found once an older room is opened up), concealed damage behind walls or under the floor that could not be seen at quoting, structural surprises in an older building, and any change you make to the agreed scope after work has started.

If a variation comes up we price it and get your written approval before doing the work. Some companies quote low and hit clients with large variations once the room is demolished. We would rather be upfront about the real cost from day one.

Yes, and we would encourage you to. Every licence on your job can be checked yourself through the NSW Fair Trading licence check, and we are happy to provide copies.

• Builder, kitchen bathroom laundry renovator: 217859C
• Plumber: 217859C
• Electrician: 377606C
• Waterproofer and tiler: 283897C
• Plastering: 302022C
• ABN: 89 478 782 763

We also carry $20 million public liability insurance through HIA, and for residential work over $20,000 we take out Home Building Compensation cover through iCare before work starts. You get the certificate before any deposit is paid.

Every renovation comes with our 10-year workmanship guarantee, which sits on top of the statutory warranties you have under NSW home building law — six years for major defects and two years for other defects under the Home Building Act.

Workmanship covers things like a towel rail coming loose, grout failing in an area, or shower screen hinges becoming faulty. It excludes wear and tear and misuse. Product warranties from manufacturers pass directly to you.

At handover you get your certificates and warranties as a complete record. Because Rick and Rob own the business and did the work, there is no chasing a departed subcontractor if something ever needs attention.