Bathroom Renovations for Kiama's Cottages and Holiday Houses

One small council, five kinds of house

The Kiama Municipal Council area runs from the Minnamurra River down to Gerroa, and in that short stretch there is more variety in housing than most cities manage.

In central Kiama and Bombo there are weatherboard and fibro cottages from the quarry and dairy years, some of them on stumps, many extended out the back in stages. Gerringong has old farm cottages in among newer subdivisions climbing the hill above Werri Beach. Kiama Downs and Minnamurra are largely brick veneer from the seventies through the nineties, with townhouses and duplexes filling in since. Gerroa is mostly holiday houses on a sand dune. And up the valley at Jamberoo the houses are farmhouses, sheds converted into living space, and cottages on acreage with their own water and their own wastewater system.

A bathroom in each of those is a different job with a different risk list. Working out which one you have, before anything comes off the wall, is most of the skill.

What usually turns up

In cottages: a bathroom added to the back verandah at some point, timber floors on piers, fibro linings that need testing, galvanised pipe that has narrowed to a straw, and joists under the shower that have been quietly wet for thirty years.

In brick veneer from the seventies to nineties: a moulded shower base that has cracked at the hob, a framed door that never shut properly, a laminate vanity swollen at the toe, and an ensuite you have to reverse out of.

In townhouses and duplexes: a slab, an owners corporation, shared walls, and a bathroom stacked above or below somebody else's.

In farmhouses: rainwater tanks and a pressure pump that sets how a shower feels, an onsite wastewater system with a limit on what you can add to it, and a long driveway that decides how material gets to the door.

In holiday houses: heavy short bursts of use, sand in everything, and a calendar that does not bend.

Salt, rain and shade

Kiama gets weather from two directions at once, and bathrooms cop both.

Salt air. It does not stop at the beachfront. Onshore wind carries salt well inland, and it collects on tapware, screen hardware, hinges, fan grilles and the fixings holding all of it to the wall. The fix is not a spray. It is choosing better base metals and stainless fixings at selection time, and rinsing the salt off what is outside.

Rainfall and humidity. The escarpment sits close behind the coast here and wrings a lot of water out of the air. Rooms stay damp for longer after a shower, and membranes take longer to cure in a wet week. A fan sized for the room, ducted outside and left running after the light goes off, does more for mould than anything you can buy in a bottle.

Low winter sun. Cottages with a bathroom on the south side barely see daylight in the room from May to August. That is worth designing around with tile colour, glass and lighting rather than fighting later.

What gets done

• Full bathroom renovations — stripped back to the frame and rebuilt properly
• Ensuites — including old sleepouts and add-ons turned into a working second bathroom
• Small bathrooms — cottages, townhouses and anywhere a metre matters
• Accessible bathrooms — step-free showers, seats, solid wall backing, non-slip floors
• Laundry renovations — the room that takes the sand, the towels and the dog
• Waterproofing and tiling — membrane, falls, set-out and cure time
• Rental and holiday-let bathrooms — tough fit-outs timed around bookings

Holiday houses and the calendar

A short-stay bathroom is a scheduling job as much as a building one. The membrane has to cure on its own timetable, the tiler cannot start early to suit you, and a bathroom that is nearly finished is still a bathroom nobody can book.

The way it works best: pick the quiet months, lock selections before the strip-out rather than during it, and build a few spare days into the program instead of hoping. If the house has two bathrooms, staging them one at a time can keep it lettable the whole way through. That is all set out on the rental and holiday-let page and in how the job runs.

Fix it once

Plenty of bathrooms down here have already been renovated once, in the cheapest way available: tiles glued over the old tiles, a new screen on the old base, and fresh silicone around a leak that was coming from underneath. It buys two or three years.

Doing it once means going back far enough to see the floor, the frame and the pipes, then rebuilding with a membrane over the lot, real falls to the waste, ventilation that vents outdoors and fittings chosen for a coastline. It costs more on the day and less over fifteen years.

Approvals, briefly

Most bathroom work inside the existing room of a house is exempt development in NSW, provided the dwelling is not a heritage item and nothing structural changes. Kiama Municipal Council maps heritage items and conservation areas, including parts of the older streets near the harbour, and some bushland-edge and valley properties are mapped as bushfire prone. Internal work is usually unaffected, but changing a window or an external wall is worth checking first. Townhouses and units need owners corporation consent where waterproofing is being replaced.

Where we work

Kiama and Kiama Heights, plus Gerringong, Kiama Downs, Minnamurra, Jamberoo, Gerroa and Bombo, along with Werri Beach, Rose Valley, Foxground, Jerrara and the farms along the valley roads.

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. Ask for them and check the number on the public register before anybody starts — it takes a minute and you should do it for every builder you talk to.

This website is not a builder and holds no licence of its own. It is also new, so there are no reviews on it and none have been invented.

If you want to understand the numbers first, start with the cost page. When you are ready, call 02 4214 4021 or send the room details through.