One council, two kinds of bathroom problem
Shellharbour City is unusual. Drive from Shell Cove to Warilla and you cross about fifty years of Australian house building in fifteen minutes.
On the eastern side, the newer estates — Shell Cove, Flinders, Blackbutt and the streets around the city centre — filled up through the 2000s and 2010s with project homes. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a slab, a tiled roof. The bathrooms in them are not falling apart. They are just original, built to a builder's allowance, and now carrying a household that has grown since.
On the western and southern side — Oak Flats, Mount Warrigal, Warilla, Barrack Heights, Barrack Point and the older parts of Albion Park — the housing is a generation or two older. Fibro and brick from the 1950s through the 1970s, often with the bathroom and laundry in a rear add-on, a separate toilet, and tiles that have been grouted over more than once.
Those two situations need different conversations, different allowances in a quote and, honestly, different advice.
What gets found in an estate-home bathroom
A flexing shower base. Acrylic and moulded bases move underfoot. Movement breaks the seal at the wall junction, and water goes behind the tiles rather than down the waste. In a two-storey home it usually shows up as a stain on a downstairs ceiling first.
A pivot door that steals the room. The door needs clear floor to swing into, which is exactly the floor you want to stand on.
A vanity that cannot cope. One shallow cupboard, two doors, no drawers, and a particleboard carcass that has been swelling at the kickboard for years.
No real ventilation. A small fan ducted into the roof space rather than outside, with no run-on timer. Steam goes up, condenses on the underside of the tiles and comes back down as mould in the cornice.
One light, in the wrong place. Centred in the ceiling, so your own shadow falls on the mirror.
What gets found on the older streets
Fibro that needs testing. Anything built or altered before about 1990 gets sampled before it is disturbed. Plenty of bathrooms, laundries and rear add-ons around Oak Flats and Warilla were lined with fibre cement sheet. If a test comes back positive, a licensed asbestos removalist handles it and issues a clearance before anything else happens.
A mortar bed on a timber floor. Thick, heavy, and hiding whatever the old shower has been doing to the joists underneath.
Galvanised pipework. Narrowed by rust, which is why the shower drops to a trickle when someone turns on the kitchen tap.
A separate toilet. A design that made sense in 1965 and wastes a square metre now.
Levels that fight you. A bathroom added on the back often sits a step down from the house, with its own patch of roof and its own drainage ideas.
The coastal part of the brief
Being near the water changes a specification more than people expect.
Salt and spray. Closest to the ocean at Shellharbour Village, Barrack Point and Warilla Beach, and around the entrance at Lake Illawarra, cheap chrome pits and fan grilles corrode. Better tapware, stainless screen fixings and marine-grade hardware are worth the small extra.
Humidity off the lake. Lake Illawarra is wide and shallow, and the air over the flat between the lake and the escarpment stays damp. A fan that is sized for the room, ducted to outside air and left running on a timer does more about mould than anything you can buy in a spray bottle.
No frost to design around. This is a mild, humid coast, not a cold-climate town. The design problems here are condensation and corrosion, not freezing pipes.
Engineered stone is off the table
Engineered stone benchtops have been banned in Australia since 1 July 2024 and are not offered here, in bathrooms or laundries. Porcelain, sintered surfaces, natural stone, solid timber and good laminate all do the job in a vanity top, and the ban is not a reason to compromise on how the room looks.
What gets quoted
The table further down this page lists the seven kinds of job and what each one suits. In short: whole rooms taken back to frame and slab, ensuites reworked, small and second bathrooms planned properly, step-free bathrooms for staying put, laundries, the waterproofing-and-tiling stages on their own, and hard-wearing rental fit-outs.
How a price is arrived at
Nobody can price your bathroom from a photo, and anyone who offers to is guessing at your expense. Two rooms the same size, one in Flinders and one in Warilla, can be thousands apart because of what sits under the floor and behind the wall.
So the sequence is simple: a free half-hour measure, then a written quote with the fittings named by model, a stated tile allowance and the older-house unknowns written in as allowances with a variation method. If a partial update would serve you better than a full strip-out, you will hear that at the measure.
Approvals, briefly
Most bathroom renovations inside the existing footprint of a house are exempt development in NSW, provided nothing structural changes and the house is not a heritage item. Shellharbour City Council is the authority for anything beyond that, and parts of the flat near Macquarie Rivulet and the lake foreshore carry flood or foreshore controls — worth a check with the council or a certifier if you are changing a window, an external wall or the footprint. Units and townhouses need owners corporation approval where waterproofing is being replaced.
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, then look the licence up on the public register yourself.
This website does not hold a builder's licence and does not pretend to. It is also new, which is why you will not find a star rating, a review count or a tally of bathrooms completed anywhere on it.
Call 02 4214 4283 or send the room details through.
The work
Seven kinds of bathroom job, and what each one suits
| Full Bathroom Renovations | The whole room back to frame and slab, then rebuilt with a membrane, new pipework and fittings chosen to survive coastal air. |
|---|---|
| Ensuites | Project-home ensuites with a flexing acrylic base and a pivot door, reworked into a room two adults can use at once. |
| Small Bathrooms | Second bathrooms, powder rooms and narrow 1960s layouts where the set-out has to be drawn before anything is ordered. |
| Accessible Bathrooms | Level-entry showers, blocked walls for rails, non-slip floors and door widths that still work with a frame. |
| Laundry Renovations | Garage and internal laundries given real bench space, a tub that fits a nappy bucket and a dryer that vents outside. |
| Waterproofing & Tiling | The two stages that decide whether the room lasts fifteen years or five, done to the standard and photographed before tiles. |
| Rental Bathrooms | Hard-wearing, quick-turnaround bathrooms for investment houses and units, scheduled around a vacancy rather than a mood board. |
Before you commit
Four things worth reading first
- Work out the ballpark. Three broad guide tiers and the things that move a price within them — what it costs.
- See how long you lose the room. Every stage in order, with where jobs actually slip — stage by stage.
- Check the awkward questions. Deposits, asbestos, salt air, strata, second bathrooms — questions.
- Then book a measure. Half an hour on site, free, and the only way anyone can quote your room honestly.
How this works
What you get, and what you will not get
- The room gets measured, not guessed
- Nobody prices a bathroom from a photo. A half-hour visit tells us what the floor is, where the waste runs and whether the wall behind the shower is still sound.
- One quote, in writing, itemised
- Tapware and vanity named by model, a stated tile allowance, and the older-house extras written in as allowances rather than sprung on you in week three.
- A licensed builder does the building
- Renovation work is carried out in partnership with a licensed NSW builder. Licence and insurance details are provided on request — ask, then look the licence up yourself.
- Nothing here is invented
- No star ratings, no job counts, no years-in-business badge. The site is new. Judge the questions asked at the measure and the quote that follows.
Rooms and starting points
A few frames from around the city
Where we work
Suburb by suburb
Also Shellharbour, Shellharbour Village, Blackbutt, Albion Park Rail, Barrack Point, Mount Warrigal, Lake Illawarra, Tullimbar, Dunmore, Croom, Flinders Estate, Shellharbour City Centre.
Questions people ask before they commit
Do you work right across Shellharbour City Council?
Yes. Shell Cove, Flinders, Blackbutt, Shellharbour Village, the city centre, Albion Park, Albion Park Rail, Oak Flats, Mount Warrigal, Warilla, Barrack Heights, Barrack Point, Dunmore and Tullimbar. The measure is free anywhere in that area.
Our house is only twenty years old. Is a renovation really worth it?
Often, yes, and for different reasons than in an old house. Estate homes from the 2000s were finished to a budget: a moulded shower base, a framed pivot door, a particleboard vanity and a single light in the middle of the ceiling. None of that fails dramatically, it just stops coping once there are four or five people using the room.
Does the salt air actually matter this far down the coast?
It matters most within a few streets of the ocean and around the lake entrance. What it attacks is cheap plating on tapware, screen hardware and towel rails, plus exhaust fan grilles. Better-quality fittings and stainless fixings are the fix, and they get specified in the quote rather than left to chance.
Who actually does the building work?
Renovation work is carried out in partnership with Coastal Renovation Group, a licensed NSW builder. Licence and insurance details are provided on request, and the NSW Fair Trading register lets you check them yourself in about a minute.
Can we have a second bathroom put in?
Sometimes, if there is a suitable space next to existing plumbing — the end of a hallway, an oversized laundry, part of a garage or under a staircase. It needs ventilation, drainage and often approval, so it is a measure-and-draw conversation rather than a phone quote.