Manly Vale Main Bathroom

The brief

The owners had lived with the original 1970s bathroom for eleven years. Nothing had actually failed — that was part of the problem. Pink wall tiles to shoulder height, painted render above, a built-in bath under the window that nobody had used in a decade, and a shower over it that soaked the floor every morning.

What we found

Two things behind the wall. The original bath had been leaking slowly at the waste for years, and the pine floor framing under it had gone soft over roughly 400mm. And the shower had no membrane at all — just tiles bedded onto a screed, standard practice in 1974 and the reason so many Northern Beaches bathrooms of this era smell faintly damp. Both were photographed, priced and signed off before we touched them; the framing repair added $1,900.

What we did

We moved the shower off the bath wall to the far corner, which freed the window wall for a freestanding bath. The vanity became wall-hung with a stone top and an arched mirror above it, and the whole room went to warm stone tiling floor to ceiling. Brushed gold tapware throughout, a recessed niche in the shower, an LED strip under the vanity, and a heated towel rail on the door wall.

The outcome

Twenty-one days on site against a quoted twenty-two. The framing repair was the only variation and the contract sum finished at $33,900 including GST, against a signed quote of $32,000 plus the signed-off variation.