Bathrooms for Ryde's Brick Units and Post-War Homes

The room this business is set up for

Drive any street off Victoria Road, Blaxland Road or Rowe Street and the pattern repeats: three-storey face-brick blocks with concrete stairs, aluminium windows and eight to twelve units. Behind each front door is a bathroom of roughly three to four and a half square metres, with a bath, a shower rose over the bath, a pedestal or small vanity basin, one louvre window, and tiles that stop somewhere around shoulder height.

They were sensible rooms in 1968. Sixty years on they leak, they grow mould in the corner the sun never reaches, and they have nowhere to put a towel.

Renovating one properly means dealing with three things at once: what is under the floor, who else has a say, and how the room can be replanned without moving the drainage. That is what these pages are about.

What we take on

Seven kinds of wet-area work, from a full main bathroom to a laundry hidden in a cupboard. No kitchens, no extensions, nothing structural beyond the room itself.

Stacked wet areas, and why they govern everything

In a walk-up block the bathrooms line up vertically. Your floor waste, your basin waste and your toilet branch all run into a shared stack inside a duct or a wall chase, and that stack keeps going through the flat above yours and the flat below.

Two consequences follow, and they shape every decision after them:

• The waste positions are close to fixed. The floor waste can often be moved a little within the room. Relocating the toilet is a much bigger question, because the branch has to fall correctly back to a stack that is not moving.
• Your floor is somebody's ceiling. Coring, chasing and jackhammering happen above a neighbour's plaster. Protection, propping and a frank conversation before the noise starts are part of the job, not an optional courtesy.

None of this prevents a genuinely good bathroom. It just means the layout is solved on paper, against measured pipe positions, before a demolition date is booked. The process page sets out where that happens.

Under the tiles in a 1960s block

Bathrooms of that era sit on a concrete slab with a thick sand-and-cement bed on top, and the falls in that bed were often set by eye. Frequently there is no membrane at all under the original tiles, only the bedding and a hope.

What comes out of a Ryde walk-up bathroom, typically:

• Tiles bedded in 40 to 70 mm of mortar, which is slow, heavy and loud to remove, and which the building's by-laws will restrict to certain hours
• A hobbed shower over a bath, with the hob formed in the same mortar
• Fibre cement sheeting on a duct panel or a soffit — tested before it is cut, because of the age
• Galvanised or early copper supply pipes with tuberculation and poor flow
• An exhaust fan venting into the ceiling space, or no fan at all, which is why the ceiling is black in one corner

Once the bed is off and the slab is clean, the room is effectively a blank concrete box — and that is the point at which a hobless shower, a wall-hung vanity and a level floor become possible. New falls are screeded, then the membrane and tiling go down to the current standard, with a certificate at the end.

Houses here, not just units

Ryde is not only flats. Between Denistone and Eastwood there are streets of solid post-war brick houses from the late 1940s through the 1950s: terracotta tile roof, timber floors at the front, a concrete-floored bathroom and laundry stuck on the back, and a separate toilet off the back verandah.

In those houses the opportunities are different. Drainage often runs under a suspended timber floor or out through a sub-floor, so layouts can genuinely change. Combining the bathroom, the separate toilet and sometimes the old laundry into one properly sized room is the single most common brief we get from house owners, and it is usually achievable.

The risks are different too. Slow shower leaks over decades soften joists and bearers. Rear additions from the 1950s to 1970s are the most likely place in the whole house to find fibre cement sheeting, so a test before demolition is standard.

Approvals, plainly

If you own a unit, the approval to plan for is your owners corporation's, not the council's. Waterproofing work in a strata scheme usually needs the owners corporation's consent, because it affects common property, and many buildings also want a by-law recording responsibility for the new membrane afterwards. Rules vary between schemes, so your by-laws and your strata manager are the authority on your building — we help you assemble what they ask for.

If you own a house, internal bathroom work with no structural change is commonly exempt development, and the council is often not involved at all. Where a new window, a visible vent or a skylight is proposed, that is worth checking with the City of Ryde or a certifier before design is finalised.

Where we work

West Ryde, Eastwood, Gladesville, Meadowbank, Macquarie Park and Denistone, plus North Ryde, East Ryde, Melrose Park, Marsfield, Putney and Tennyson Point.

Who does the work

Renovation work is carried out in partnership with Coastal Renovation Group, a licensed NSW builder. Licence and insurance details are provided on request. Plumbing, electrical and asbestos removal are separately licensed in NSW and go to appropriately licensed trades.

There are no reviews on this site, because there are none to show yet and we have not invented any. Judge the drawing and the itemised quote you get after the measure.

Call 02 5563 0307 or send the room through. If you want a sense of budget first, the cost page has broad tiers.