The renovation story
A whole-apartment refit, not a room at a time
This is a full interior renovation of an apartment in Wollstonecraft, taking in the kitchen, main bathroom, powder room, laundry and flooring in a single program of works. Everything came out: cabinetry, benchtops, splashbacks, tapware, tiles, the bath, the shower screen, the carpet and the skirting.
Running all four areas at once is the harder option to live through and the cheaper option overall. Every trade attends once instead of returning for each room, and the waterproofing, tiling and joinery each happen as one continuous operation rather than four separate small ones. Nine weeks on site covers what would take considerably longer if the rooms were staged.
Spending the budget where it shows
The plumbing brief was deliberate: new fittings and fixtures, same locations. In an apartment that decision matters more than it does in a house. Moving a toilet or a sink can mean core-drilling through a slab, running new waste through shared structure, and getting the owners corporation to approve it, and the cost of all that lands before a single tile goes on the wall.
Keeping the layout meant the money went into what the owner sees and touches every day. Stone benchtops to the kitchen, laundry and bathroom vanity, with the stone carried up as the kitchen splashback and above the floating shelves. Flat panel polyurethane joinery with soft-close hardware throughout. A corner bath, a frameless shower screen, and electric underfloor heating to the main bathroom on its own circuit and programmable thermostat. Brushed nickel tapware from the ABI Elysian range across all three wet areas.
Where the build is up to
The apartment is at fit-off, the last stage before handover: tapware and sanitaryware going on, joinery hardware adjusted, shaving cabinets wired in, and the final caulking and clean ahead of the walk-through.
If you are weighing up a similar project, our interior renovation calculator gives a ballpark in a couple of minutes, and our guide to comparing renovation quotes explains what to look for when the numbers come back.
