Bathroom renovations, priced before you call

Most full bathroom renovations in Melbourne land between $21,000 and $36,000 in 2026. A cosmetic refresh that keeps the existing layout runs $12,000–$18,000. Premium work with custom joinery, stone and underfloor heating sits between $37,000 and $58,000.

Our packages are published with those bands on the bathroom page, and the estimator will narrow the range for your specific bathroom in about a minute. The fixed price comes in writing after a free site visit.

Keep the layout. Leaving the toilet, shower and vanity in their existing positions avoids opening the floor, re-running drainage to fall and re-waterproofing — that alone is around $4,500 on a standard bathroom, and more on a concrete slab.

After that: choose a standard-format tile rather than large-format or mosaic, keep tiling to shower height rather than full height on every wall, and pick quality mid-range tapware instead of designer brands. None of those decisions affect how long the bathroom lasts.

What we’d never suggest cutting: waterproofing, the substrate under the tiles, or licensed trades for plumbing and electrical. Those are the things that fail expensively.

Two to three weeks for a refresh, three to five for a full renovation, five to seven for premium work with custom joinery or stone.

Those are working weeks on site and they assume your selections are locked before demolition. The most common cause of an overrun is a tile or tapware decision still being made while the trades wait — which is why we finalise every selection before the first day.

If it’s your only bathroom, we sequence the work to minimise the dead time and can usually keep the toilet operational for most of the job.

AS 3740 — the Australian Standard for waterproofing domestic wet areas. It governs which surfaces must be waterproofed, how high the membrane goes in a shower, how junctions and penetrations are treated, and the curing time before tiling.

Waterproofing must be carried out by a licensed waterproofer, and you should receive a certificate. We photograph every stage of the membrane before it’s tiled over and hand you the documentation at completion.

This is the part of a bathroom you will never see and the only part whose failure is catastrophic. A leak into a subfloor discovered two years later costs more to rectify than the original renovation.

Usually not. A straightforward bathroom renovation that replaces fixtures and finishes within the existing room, without altering any structural element, generally does not require a building permit.

You do need one if the work involves structural change — removing or altering a load-bearing wall to enlarge the room, cutting new openings in structural walls, or altering the roof for a skylight in some circumstances.

Regardless of permits, the plumbing and electrical work must be done by appropriately licensed trades, and you should receive compliance certificates for both. That’s a legal requirement, not a nicety, and those certificates are what a buyer’s conveyancer will eventually ask for.

It’s the per-square-metre budget the quote assumes for your tiles. Our Refresh package allows $45/m², Full Renovation allows $70/m², and Premium allows $120/m².

If you choose tiles that cost more, you pay the difference on the extra square metres — not a re-quote of the whole job. If you choose cheaper tiles, the difference comes back to you.

Allowances exist because tile prices range from $30/m² to well over $300/m², and no honest builder can quote a bathroom before you’ve chosen. Be wary of any quote that doesn’t state one: it either assumes the cheapest tile on the market, or it’s leaving room for a variation later.

We tell you the day we find it, with photos, a cost to rectify and options — before we do anything about it.

Old bathrooms hide failed waterproofing, rotted studs and bottom plates, corroded pipework, and floors that aren’t level. Nobody can see any of it until demolition day, so nobody can quote it beforehand honestly.

What we do is carry a stated contingency in the quote rather than pretending the risk doesn’t exist. If we don’t use it, you don’t pay it. What we won’t do is discover a problem, fix it silently, and present you with a variation at the end.

Less than people expect. A compact bathroom saves on tiles and waterproofing area, which is why our estimator applies a 15% reduction — but the expensive parts barely scale.

You still need the same fixtures, the same licensed plumber and electrician, the same number of trade visits, and the same day-rate for each of them. A two-square-metre bathroom needs a toilet, a shower, a vanity and a functioning waste just as much as a six-square-metre one does.

Small bathrooms can occasionally cost more per square metre, because working in a tight space is slower and some fixtures need custom solutions to fit.

Yes, meaningfully — usually 15–25% less than doing them a year apart.

Trades mobilise once instead of twice. Materials come in one order. The waterproofer, tiler and plumber each do one continuous run of work rather than two separate call-outs with setup and pack-down on both. Site protection goes down once.

The obvious downside is having no bathroom at all for the duration. If that’s workable — you’re moving out, or there’s a third toilet — doing both together is one of the clearest savings available in a renovation.