Bathroom & Kitchen Renovations In Caulfield

A full bathroom strip-out and rebuild in Melbourne typically starts in the mid teens of thousands of dollars for a standard-sized room with mid-range fixtures, and climbs from there with size, tile choice, and whether wet points are being moved. Kitchens vary even more widely because cabinetry and benchtops dominate the cost, and the range from a modest flat-pack fit-out to custom joinery with stone is enormous. If a load-bearing wall is coming out to open the space up, add roughly $3,500 to $9,000 including the structural engineering and the steel beam. The costs competitors leave off their quotes are waste disposal, engineering fees, building surveyor charges and site protection, and we list every one of them.

A standard bathroom renovation runs about four to six weeks from strip-out to fit-off, and for most of that the room is genuinely unusable. The sequence is fixed and cannot be compressed much: demolition, framing, plumbing and electrical rough-in, waterproofing and its cure time, screed and tiling, then fit-off. Kitchens are usually three to five weeks, and cabinetry lead time is often the constraint rather than the on-site work, so we order early. If you have only one bathroom we will tell you at quote stage exactly which days you will have no shower, so you can plan rather than discover it.

Waterproofing is carried out to AS 3740 by the appropriate trade and certified, and the certificate matters because it is what protects you and any future sale of the house. It is the single item in a bathroom that cannot be corrected later without removing the tiles and starting again, so it is not a place to save money or take shortcuts on cure times. We coordinate it as part of the programme and make sure the falls to the waste are right before the membrane goes down, because a perfect membrane over a floor that ponds is still a bathroom with water sitting in it. You get the certificate with your handover documents.

We do. That is one of the main reasons people engage a carpenter to run a wet-area renovation rather than booking trades themselves. The order is protection and strip-out, then framing and noggings, then plumbing and electrical rough-in, then waterproofing and cure, then screed and tiling, then cabinetry and fit-off, then final plumbing and electrical connection. Every one of those has to happen in that order, and a single trade turning up late pushes everything behind it. We book the sequence, hold the trades to it, and send you a short update at the end of each day so you know what happened and who is coming tomorrow.

Strip-outs on older Melbourne homes regularly reveal something, and the most common finds are water damage to studs and floor structure around the shower, rot in the subfloor under a long-leaking waste, and asbestos-containing sheet in bathrooms and laundries built or renovated before the late 1980s. Asbestos is not something we handle ourselves. If we suspect it, work stops and a licensed removalist is engaged, and we will tell you that upfront rather than mid-job. For everything else, we photograph what we have found, price it, and send it to you for written approval before we continue. Your original quote does not move without your say-so.

If the layout works, the waterproofing is sound and the room is simply dated, a refresh is far better value: new vanity, tapware, lighting, paint and possibly re-grouting will transform a bathroom for a fraction of a full renovation. If the waterproofing has failed, if there is any sign of water in the walls or subfloor, or if you want to move the shower, bath or wet points, you are into a full strip-out whether you like it or not, because you cannot get to any of it without removing tiles. Kitchens are more forgiving, and replacing doors and benchtops on sound carcasses is a genuinely good-value middle path. We will walk the room and tell you which category you are actually in.