Service area
Bathroom renovations in Lennox Head
Bathroom renovations in Lennox Head, between the point and Seven Mile Beach. Two things separate this from the rest of the coast we work on: it is more exposed than almost anywhere, and it sits in Ballina Shire rather than Byron.
(02) 9072 1997What we build
The bathrooms we build in Lennox Head
Four rooms cover most of it. Which one you are having depends almost entirely on which half of the housing you live in.
Full bathroom renovations
The whole room back to the frame. In a newer house this is a straightforward job done properly. In a shack it is also a conversation about the frame itself.
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Walk in showers and wet rooms
The most requested change here and the one where the age of the house decides the price, because a slab has to be cut where a raised timber floor usually does not.
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Ensuites
Standard in the newer half of Lennox, and nearly always the same problem: four fixtures, one short run of wall, and a shared bedroom wall that carries noise.
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Step free and small bathrooms
The beach shack job. Small rooms, a level floor that actually works, and solid timber put in the wall for rails now rather than chased out later.
Read moreWhat is included
What a renovation actually covers
One builder does the whole job, so nobody is waiting on anybody and there is one person to ring. This is what you get, and it is priced the same way on your quote.
Strip out and make good
- Protection through the house and the room stripped to the frame
- Old fixtures, tile, mortar bed and lining removed and carted away
- The floor opened up and photographed before anything is quoted as final
- Any soft timber, rot or old failed patching replaced while it is open
- Walls blocked out for rails, niches, a vanity and a screen before lining
The wet area
- Plumbing and electrical roughed in by licensed trades, with certificates
- Falls set in the mortar bed and taken to the drain, not corrected in the tile
- Waterproofing to AS 3740, with a flexible strip at every corner that moves
- Every stage photographed under the tile and handed to you as a record
- A flood test on the finished waterproofing before a single tile goes down
Finishes and fit off
- Wall and floor tiling, with the layout drawn before the first sheet is cut
- Vanity, basin, toilet, bath and shower screen supplied or installed
- Taps, rails, shelves and mirror fitted and adjusted
- Silicone, grout, paint and trims finished and the room cleaned
- A walk through with you, and anything on the list fixed before we invoice
Pay attention to the hardware here. Lennox is the most exposed place we work. Brackets, hinges, rails and the screws behind them are what decide whether the room still looks right in ten years.
- The council
- Ballina Shire, not Byron
- The exposure
- Open coast, and the wind carries it inland
- The houses
- Old beach shacks beside new builds
- Drying out
- Salt air and humidity, so ventilation counts
The houses here
A village that grew up fast
Lennox Head sits eleven kilometres from Ballina and twenty from Byron, with Lake Ainsworth on one side and Seven Mile Beach running north from the point toward Broken Head. Close to nine thousand people live across Lennox Head and Skennars Head now, which is a great many more than the village that the older half of the housing was built for.
So the stock is in two clear halves. Original beach shacks, low set, fibro and weatherboard, small rooms. And newer houses, slab on ground, bigger, with an ensuite as standard.
What both halves share is the position. The point is a hang gliding launch, which tells you most of what you need to know about how much weather crosses this place.
Exposure is not a mood. It is a specification, and it is written on the fixings.
What it changes
What exposure and a different council do
Nothing here makes a Lennox bathroom harder to build well. It makes two things worth being explicit about, and one of them is administrative rather than physical.
- 01
The approvals run through Ballina Shire
This is the one people are most often surprised by, because Lennox reads as part of the Byron coast and administratively it is not. For a straight bathroom renovation it usually changes very little, but where anything touches waste, drainage or structure it is Ballina's process, and we work to that rather than assuming.
- 02
The exposure here is worse than it is further north
An open coast with a headland at the end of it and steady onshore wind moves a lot of salt inland. Screen hardware, hinges, rails and the fixings behind them are specified for a marine environment. The hidden ones matter most, because nobody finds those until a wall comes off.
- 03
Two vintages of house, two entirely different jobs
An original beach shack is small rooms, fibro linings and a layout problem. A newer house on a slab is a bigger room, an ensuite and a slab that has to be cut for a level entry. Quoting one as though it were the other is how a job goes wrong.
- 04
Fibro in an older house is treated as asbestos until tested
Wet area sheeting in anything built before the early nineties gets that assumption, and where testing confirms it, it comes out under a licensed removalist with clearance paperwork. Known cost, known process, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a phone call halfway through.
- 05
The room has to be able to dry
Salt air and coastal humidity together are what age a bathroom from the grout out. The fan gets sized for the room and ducted outside rather than into the roof. It is the cheapest line on the job and the one most often skipped.
Getting it in and out
Easy streets, a longer trip
Access here is not the problem. The streets are flat, driveways are usable and a skip goes where you would expect it to go.
The honest constraint is distance rather than terrain. Lennox is the far end of where we work, so the job gets planned around fewer trips instead of pretending it is around the corner.
- Skip on the driveway, which works on most blocks here
- Deliveries staged in fewer, fuller loads, because the trip is real
- Marine grade hardware specified up front, including the fixings behind the wall
- Older fibro identified and tested before any strip out begins
- Anything touching waste or structure taken through Ballina Shire, not assumed
Two vintages, two different jobs
Primed, then two coats, then tested
Finishes last longer than the fixings do
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Renovating in Lennox Head
Tell us about the room and we will come and look at it. You get a fixed scope written down item by item, so you know what you are paying for before anything starts.
(02) 9072 1997