PROJECTS

Mawson, ACT

Home Renovation in Mawson, ACT

I was too nervous to walk on the balconies

This one came through a referral from a past client, which already tells you something about how it ended. Two bathrooms and two balconies, on a house the client had moved out of and kept as an investment. The bathrooms were leaking. The balconies were worse. When I did the first inspection, I genuinely didn't want to put my full weight on them. All the old timber had decayed. Holes in it. Not something you'd want a kid or a tradie walking across...


Two bathroom renovations and a balcony rebuild. Sounds simple written down like that. It didn't stay simple.

Staging it so the clock kept moving

Waterproofing has curing time built in, up to ten days to two weeks between coats and screeding, so we started the bathrooms first and got them to that stage.


While that cured, we moved onto demolishing the balconies. Once we opened the bathrooms up, the water damage turned out to be structural, into the floor joists and stud work, not just surface level.


We showed the client on site and she gave us the go ahead to fix it properly.

Modern gray bathroom with floating wood vanity, white sink, and arched mirror
Balcony with dark railing and gray floor beside tan brick wall, overlooking trees and cloudy sky

Rotten timber, and a better way to rebuild it

The balcony rafters turned out to be cantilevered, running back through the house and out past the wall by the width of the balcony. They were so decayed and so damaged that it was genuinely a hard problem, not just a demolition job.


I didn't walk onto that site with the steel solution already in my head. Timber is fine outdoors, but only as good as the maintenance behind it, and these hadn't had any.


We brought in an engineer and worked through it properly, and landed on a steel beam in place of the old timber one. Steel carries more load for a smaller section, so the finished balcony actually reads cleaner and more minimal than what was there before, and it will not rot the way the old one did.


Five and a half weeks, bathrooms and balconies both. I know because I counted.

Halfway through, our client got nervous. Fair enough

Structural work, and the property sat under a body corporate. Halfway through the balcony rebuild, the client raised it with us, understandably. My answer to her was straightforward: this is why you pay for a licensed builder. Not to speak badly of anyone else in the trade, there are plenty of good carpenters doing good work, but when it's structural and it's licensed, we don't get to cut a corner even if we wanted to.


We'd already engaged an engineer for the redesign, so a certificate of structural sufficiency existed. We handed it to her the day it was issued and she passed it straight to the body corporate. That was the end of it.

Where it ended up

High end Italian tiles, good plumbing fixtures, two bathrooms that finally worked the way they should. She referred us straight to someone she knew, work we're talking through right now. That's the bit I actually care about. Not the finish, the referral. That's someone telling their friend it's safe.

Suburb

Mawson, ACT

Project type

Bathroom renovation and balcony rebuild

Architect

Not applicable, direct client engagement

Modern bathroom with toilet, sink, glass shower, frosted windows, and tiled walls

If a renovation has already thrown up more than you bargained for, or you just want to see what handling it properly actually looks like, come and have a look.