Balcony Tiling ACT - Cost and Specification Guide

What Balcony Tiling Costs in the ACT

A tiled balcony is four layers doing four different jobs, and the tile is the least important of them. Underneath the tile sits an adhesive bed, under that a screed that creates the fall, and under that the membrane that actually keeps water out of the building. Tile is a wearing surface and a finish. It is not waterproof, the grout between it is not waterproof, and no amount of either will compensate for a membrane that has failed. Almost every balcony quote that goes wrong goes wrong because the conversation stayed on the tile.

That is why the honest price range is so wide. Tiling over a sound existing structure runs $95 to $165 a square metre and is genuinely all that is needed on a balcony built properly and still watertight. A full rebuild with the tile and bed stripped, a new membrane to AS 4654, a screed laid to form a fall and frost rated tile runs $320 to $620. A four by two metre balcony therefore sits somewhere between about $760 and $4,960 depending entirely on what is found underneath. Nobody can tell which from the surface.

Canberra pushes almost every one of these balconies toward the higher figure, and the reason is the cold. The airport records a July mean minimum of 0.1 degrees and a June minimum of 0.9, lower than any other Australian capital. Water that sits in a bed or behind a tile freezes overnight, expands, and thaws the next day, and it does that repeatedly from May to September. An indoor floor never experiences this. A balcony with poor falls experiences it every winter until the bond gives up, which is why Canberra balconies fail in sheets rather than one tile at a time.

The second territory specific issue is what sits below. A great many Canberra balconies, particularly in the townhouse and apartment stock built from the 1990s onward, sit directly over a bedroom or a living room. A leak there is not a stain on a wall outside, it is a ceiling repair at $650 to $2,400 plus whatever the insulation and the flooring cost. That changes the economics of doing the membrane correctly the first time, and it is the single best argument for a flood test before a tile goes down.

Balcony Tiling Costs by Scope

Balcony pricing separates into four scopes and the names people use for them overlap confusingly, so it helps to define them by what gets replaced. Tiling only means new tile on the existing bed, membrane and falls. A relay means the tile comes up and goes back down on a corrected bed. A membrane replacement means stripping to the slab and starting the waterproofing again. A rebuild means all of that plus a new screed to form the fall. The figures below are territory wide bands for 2026 and each assumes the scope has been settled first.

The item most often left out of a quote entirely is the screed. Falls have to be formed in something, and on a slab poured flat, which describes a great many Canberra balconies, the screed is the only thing that can do it. At $45 to $95 a square metre it is a real cost rather than an afterthought, and a quote that proposes a new membrane without a screed on a flat slab is proposing a membrane that will sit under standing water for the next twenty years. Ask where the fall is coming from and the answer tells you whether the quote is serious.

External Membranes and AS 4654

The membrane is the only part of a balcony that keeps water out of the building, and the standard that governs it is AS 4654, which covers waterproofing membranes for external above ground use. That is a different document from AS 3740, which covers waterproofing of domestic wet areas, meaning bathrooms, laundries and similar rooms inside the house. The distinction is not administrative. An external membrane has to survive ultraviolet exposure during construction, thermal movement across a range from below freezing to well above thirty degrees, and water standing on it rather than draining away within minutes. An indoor membrane never meets any of those three conditions.

Applied at $85 to $160 a square metre including detailing, an external membrane goes on in multiple coats with reinforcing at every internal corner, every change of plane and every penetration. The flat field of the balcony is the easy part. The upstands at the walls, the termination at the threshold, the fall into the outlet and the collar around each balustrade fixing are where the work is, and they are where failures start. The flat middle of a balcony almost never leaks.

Both of these belong in the written scope rather than the conversation. The first is the product and the system, named by manufacturer rather than described generically, because the detailing requirements come from the manufacturer rather than from the standard alone. The second is photographs at each coat with the date visible, because once tile is laid nobody can see the membrane again. Waterproofing services quoted without naming a system are quoted without a commitment. Name the product and the detailing requirements come with it.

Where the existing membrane might be sound, resist the temptation to assume it. Membranes from the 1990s and early 2000s were commonly bathroom systems used outdoors, and they have been through twenty five Canberra winters. A flood test at $180 to $420 is cheap relative to stripping a balcony a second time, and it is the only evidence that counts. A verbal assurance that a membrane is sound is not evidence of anything.

Across the ACT the membranes being replaced now were mostly installed in the 1990s and early 2000s, which puts them at or beyond service life regardless of workmanship. Waterproofing services in the ACT and roof repairs frequently come up in the same Canberra inspection, because a balcony and the roof above it share the same exposure to Territory weather.

Falls, Drainage and Standing Water

A fall is the slope that moves water off the balcony, and the practical working figure is around one in a hundred, which is roughly ten millimetres of drop for every metre of balcony depth. A two metre deep balcony therefore needs about twenty millimetres between the door threshold and the outer edge or the outlet. That sounds trivial and it is the difference between a balcony that dries after rain and one that holds a puddle for two days. In Canberra that puddle freezes, and freezing is what breaks the bond. A balcony that drains within the hour never reaches that point.

Most Canberra balcony slabs were poured flat or close to it, which means the fall has to be built in the screed above the membrane or, in better detailing, below it. Forming a fall in screed runs $45 to $95 a square metre and the cost rises with the depth needed. Where the threshold has no height available, the slab itself sometimes has to be ground down at the door, which is a different and more expensive conversation. Grinding a slab at a doorway runs $380 to $950 and is sometimes the only route available.

Standing water is the specific enemy in this climate rather than a general nuisance. Water that cannot drain freezes overnight through the Canberra winter, and freezing water expands by about nine per cent. The expansion happens in the bed, in the grout joint and inside any tile porous enough to have absorbed it. Repeat that across sixty or seventy nights and the bond fails. A balcony that drains properly never gets the opportunity.

Outlets deserve more attention than they get. A single outlet at one corner is common and works where the falls genuinely converge on it. Where they do not, the outlet is decorative. Adding or relocating an outlet runs $450 to $1,400 depending on what the plumbing underneath allows, and it is frequently cheaper than rebuilding a screed to chase water across a balcony to the wrong corner. Water will not travel uphill to suit a drawing.

Frost, Freeze Cycling and Tile Selection

Tile selection for a Canberra balcony comes down to water absorption, and every other consideration is secondary. A tile that absorbs water will crack when that water freezes inside it, because the water expands and the tile does not. External rated porcelain with low absorption at $45 to $110 a square metre is the standard answer, and the absorption figure appears on the manufacturer data sheet rather than on the showroom display. A tile with no published absorption figure should be treated as unsuitable outdoors.

The climate figures are worth knowing because they explain why this is stricter here than in Sydney or Brisbane. Canberra Airport records a July mean minimum of 0.1 degrees, a June minimum of 0.9 and an August minimum of 1.2, with the annual mean minimum at 6.8. Those averages mean a substantial number of nights below zero every winter, and each one is a freeze cycle for any water held in the assembly. Sixty or seventy cycles a winter is enough to break almost any bond that holds water. Keeping water out of the bed is therefore the whole strategy.

Adhesive matters as much as tile and is more often got wrong. External work needs a polymer modified adhesive rated for external use, applied at full coverage rather than in dabs, because a void under a tile is a place for water to collect and freeze. The notched trowel and back buttering that a tiler uses indoors on large format tile becomes mandatory outdoors on every format. Full coverage is the single most useful thing to insist on in an external quote. It is also easy to verify, because a lifted tile shows the coverage immediately.

Grout is the third element. External grout needs to be flexible and water resistant, and the joint width needs to be wide enough to accommodate thermal movement rather than squeezed to a minimum for appearance. A hairline joint looks neat in a photograph and gives the tile nowhere to expand on a thirty five degree January afternoon.

Movement Joints on an Exposed Slab

An exposed balcony moves far more than an indoor floor because it sees the full daily temperature swing. A Canberra balcony can go from below zero at seven in the morning to over thirty on a summer afternoon, and the slab, the screed and the tile all expand and contract at different rates across that range. Concrete, cement screed and glazed porcelain all have different expansion rates, and they are bonded together.

Movement joints are the designed relief for that. They go at the perimeter where the tile meets a wall or a balustrade upstand, over any structural joint in the slab, at any change of substrate, which is the surface the tile is laid on, and at intervals across the field. At $18 to $40 a lineal metre on new work they are one of the cheapest items in the job and one of the most commonly omitted. Retrofitting them later after cracking appears costs more and looks worse.

The perimeter joint is the one to check in any quote. Tile grouted hard against a wall on all four sides has nowhere to go, and on an exposed slab it will either lift at the edge or crack across the field. A flexible sealant joint at the perimeter, hidden behind a skirting tile or a sealant line, costs very little and prevents the most common cracking pattern on Canberra balconies. It is also invisible once the skirting tile goes on, so nobody loses anything visually.

Thresholds, Doors and Where Leaks Start

The threshold is the junction where the balcony meets the door, and it is where most balcony leaks into a building begin. The requirement is simple to state and hard to achieve in a retrofit: the finished tile level has to sit low enough relative to the door that water driven against the opening cannot get over the membrane upstand and inside. Driving rain against a sliding door is the condition that finds any shortfall here.

The difficulty is that height is finite. Every millimetre added by a new screed, a new membrane, a new adhesive bed and a new tile reduces the step down at the door. Tiling over an existing floor makes this worse rather than better, and it is the strongest practical argument for stripping back rather than building up. Threshold detailing runs $280 to $780 per opening and that figure buys the membrane termination, the flashing, which is the metal strip that sheds water away from a junction, where there is one and the sealant line.

Where the height genuinely is not available, there are three honest options. Grind the slab down at the threshold at $380 to $950. Install a threshold drain or grate across the opening at $420 to $1,250 so water is intercepted before it reaches the door. Or use a thinner assembly, which usually means a thinner tile and a tighter bed. What does not work is laying the floor level with the door and hoping the weather stays reasonable.

In Canberra the threshold detail carries extra weight because driving rain arrives with the spring and summer storms rather than steadily through the year. Storm damage repairs across the ACT commonly trace back to a balcony threshold that coped with ordinary rain and not with a Territory thunderstorm, and ceiling repairs below are the usual consequence.

Balustrade Fixings Through a Membrane

Every balustrade post bolted down through the balcony surface is a hole through the waterproofing, and every one of those holes has to be sealed as a detail in its own right. Sealing a penetration correctly runs $120 to $340 per fixing, which sounds high until you consider that one unsealed bolt will put water into the slab indefinitely.

The better detailing avoids the problem by fixing the balustrade to the side of the slab or to the face of the edge beam rather than through the top surface. Where a balustrade is being replaced at the same time as the tiling, that change is worth raising, because it removes a whole category of future leak. Balustrade and handrail repairs and balcony tiling belong in the same conversation for exactly this reason. Doing them separately means sealing penetrations twice.

Where top fixing cannot be avoided, the sequence matters. The fixing goes in, the membrane is dressed up and around it with reinforcement, and the sealing is completed before anything is tiled over. A balustrade bolted down after the membrane has been laid and tiled has punched through the only thing keeping water out, and no amount of silicone on top of the tile will undo that. The order of work is the whole protection here.

Balconies Over Habitable Space

A balcony over a bedroom or a living room is a different risk category from a balcony over a garden, and it justifies a different standard of care. The failure mode is not a damp external wall, it is water appearing through a ceiling, taking insulation, plaster, cornice and often flooring with it. Ceiling repairs run $650 to $2,400 a room before anybody has touched the balcony that caused them. Flooring, insulation and cornice often go with the plaster.

A great deal of the Canberra townhouse and apartment stock built from the 1990s onward has exactly this arrangement, and a fair amount of it was built with an internal grade membrane. Those balconies are now between twenty five and thirty five years old, which is around or beyond the service life of the waterproofing regardless of how well it was installed. Age alone is reason enough to test rather than assume.

Several precautions are worth the money on any balcony over habitable space. A flood test before tiling at $180 to $420. Photographs of the membrane at each coat with dates. And a written scope naming the standard and the product. Those three cost a few hundred dollars combined and they are the only evidence available if the balcony leaks in year three and somebody needs to establish why.

Flood Testing Before Tile Goes Down

A flood test is the only way to know whether a membrane works before it is permanently hidden. The outlet is plugged, the balcony is filled with water to just below the threshold upstand, and it is left for twenty four to forty eight hours while somebody checks the ceiling below, the external soffit and any wall underneath for the first sign of moisture. It costs $180 to $420. The outlay is small against what it rules out.

The value of it is asymmetric, which is what makes it an easy decision. If the test passes, a few hundred dollars bought certainty before thousands went on top of it. If it fails, the failure is found while the membrane is still accessible and the fix costs a fraction of what it costs once tile is laid and a ceiling has been wet.

A tiler who suggests a flood test without being asked is worth paying attention to, and one who declines to do one on a balcony over a bedroom has made a decision about risk that the owner carries rather than the tiler. Ask for the test to appear as a line item in the quote so it is clearly in scope rather than something that gets skipped on a busy Friday. A line item is harder to drop than a verbal intention.

Stripping Back Versus Tiling Over

Tiling over an existing balcony surface is quicker, cheaper and almost always the wrong call in Canberra. It adds height at the threshold where height is the scarce commodity, it adds weight to a slab that was designed for one layer, and it leaves whatever is failing underneath in place with a new surface on top making it harder to diagnose. The next tiler then has two unknown layers to work through instead of one.

Stripping the tile and bed runs $45 to $90 a square metre including waste removal, and what it buys is knowledge. Once the slab is visible the condition of the membrane, the actual fall and any cracking in the concrete are all apparent, and the scope can be priced against what is there rather than against an assumption.

There is a narrow case where tiling over is defensible. The existing surface passes a flood test, the falls are adequate and demonstrable, the threshold has at least twenty millimetres of height to spare, and the structure is sound. Where all four hold, tiling over at $95 to $165 a square metre is a genuine saving. In practice those conditions coincide rarely, and a tiler who proposes tiling over without testing any of them is proposing a finish rather than a repair.

Building Approval and Certifier Inspections

Whether balcony work needs a building approval in the ACT depends on what is being touched rather than on the presence of tile. Replacing a tiled surface on sound structure is generally maintenance. Work affecting the structural integrity of the slab, the edge beam or the balustrade, or altering weatherproofing in ways the Building Code addresses, moves into approval territory. The safest course is to ask a certifier rather than to interpret the exemptions yourself.

The exemption framework is specific about what an exempt job must not do. It must not affect structural integrity, fire rated elements, fire escapes, natural light, ventilation, fire protection or Building Code compliance, and it must not involve asbestos. A balcony rebuild that involves cutting the slab, altering the balustrade fixings structurally or changing the drainage arrangement is capable of touching several of those. The position is worth confirming with a certifier through ACT planning rather than assumed.

Where an approval is required, the mandatory inspection stages are worth knowing because of what they do not include. Certifiers inspect footings before the footing concrete is poured, the structural framework of a class one or class ten building before internal lining, formwork and steel for any reinforced concrete member before the pour, and completion of the approved work. Waterproofing appears on none of those stages, and neither does the balcony membrane. That is precisely why the flood test and the photographs matter.

Licensing in the Territory shapes who can be held to what. Access Canberra administers construction occupation licences across the ACT, and neither tiling nor waterproofing is a licensed occupation. Those holding licences are builders including owner builders, electricians, plumbers, drainers and gasfitters, building surveyors, building assessors, gas appliance workers, works assessors and plumbing plan certifiers. On a Canberra balcony the plumber connecting a new outlet does hold a licence, and that licence can be verified.

Who Carries a Failed Balcony

The ACT statutory warranty, which is a guarantee the law attaches to building work regardless of what the contract says, matters more on a balcony than on most tiling work. Under the Building Act, residential building work that required a building approval and cost $12,000 or more carries that warranty, and structural elements carry six years while non structural elements carry two. Weatherproofing is expressly included in the structural category.

A balcony membrane is weatherproofing in the most literal sense available, so a balcony rebuild that clears the threshold carries six years rather than two. That is a materially better position than most tiling work enjoys, and it is worth structuring a job to stay above the threshold rather than splitting it into stages that each fall below. Two $8,000 stages carry far less protection than one $16,000 job.

The warranties themselves are substantive rather than formal. Compliance with the Act is required, as is work performed skilfully and in line with the approved plans, materials that are sound and suitable, and a result fit for its purpose wherever the owner leaned on the builder judgement. Terms limiting any of that are void, the warranty applies whether or not it was written down, and the remaining period passes to a later purchaser. That makes the paperwork worth keeping with the property file.

Below the threshold, Australian Consumer Law guarantees apply instead and cannot be contracted out of either. Disputes with a builder or tiler go to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which is the independent body that hears civil claims generally up to $25,000 and also hears unit title disputes. The ACCC publishes what the consumer guarantees cover. They apply to the service as well as to the materials.

Apartment and Unit Title Balconies

On a unit titled property the first question is not what the balcony costs but who owns which part of it, and the answer decides who pays. The structural slab is commonly common property. The membrane is commonly common property as well, since it protects the building rather than the unit. The tiled surface is often the responsibility of the unit owner.

That split produces the familiar and clearly difficult situation where an owner wants to retile and the membrane underneath belongs to the owners corporation. Retiling without resolving the membrane question means burying somebody else property under your new floor, and discovering a year later that it needs replacing.

Get the position in writing from the owners corporation before engaging a tiler, and get it in terms that name the membrane specifically rather than referring vaguely to the balcony. Where the corporation and an owner disagree, unit title disputes are heard at the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. Approval for the work itself is also commonly required, and tile selection is sometimes constrained by rules about external appearance.

Unit titled stock across the ACT is concentrated in Canberra Central, Belconnen town centre, Woden and Gungahlin, and the balcony question comes up constantly in those districts. A building inspection in the ACT commissioned by the owners corporation is routinely the cheapest way to settle whether a Territory balcony problem is one unit or the whole building.

Slip Resistance on an External Surface

An external balcony is wet more often than any floor inside the house and in Canberra it is also frosted a good number of mornings each winter, which makes slip resistance a practical matter rather than a specification box. AS 4586 classifies the slip resistance of new pedestrian surface materials, and the classification is on the tile data sheet. Ask for the sheet rather than relying on how the sample feels dry in a showroom.

A polished or lightly textured tile that reads beautifully in a showroom becomes a real hazard on a balcony at seven in the morning in July. Choosing for the wet and frosted condition rather than the dry one is the whole decision, and it costs nothing at the point of selection. Choosing again after a fall has been taken costs a great deal.

Where a balcony is already tiled too smoothly, chemical slip treatment at $45 to $95 a square metre raises the wet coefficient of friction without visibly changing the tile, and it avoids a retile. External treatments need reapplication over time because the surface is exposed, which is a maintenance item rather than a failure. Budget for reapplication every few years on an exposed surface.

Timelines and the Canberra Weather Window

A full balcony rebuild is a week to ten days of work with curing stages built into it, and the curing is what extends it rather than the labour. Stripping takes a day or two. The screed takes a day and then needs to cure. The membrane goes on in coats with drying time between them and a full cure before anything covers it. The flood test needs a day or two of standing water. Tiling and grouting follow, and the grout needs to cure before the balcony is used.

Canberra adds a seasonal constraint that in practice real matters. Membranes and adhesives have minimum application temperatures, commonly around five degrees and sometimes higher, and a Canberra winter morning sits below that until mid morning for much of June, July and August. A frost on the slab rules out starting at all. Winter work is therefore slower rather than impossible, and the working day is shorter.

The practical answer is to book external work for the shoulder seasons. October and November, or March and April, give full working days and temperatures comfortably above application minimums without the January heat that makes adhesive skin over before tile can be set. A tiler who declines a July start on a balcony is applying the product data sheet rather than being awkward. Pushing a tiler to start on a frosty morning transfers the risk to you.

Canberra District Pricing and Balcony Age

Balcony pricing across the ACT tracks the age and type of the building more closely than the suburb. The decade of construction decides what membrane was used, whether a fall was formed and whether anything lives underneath, and those three between them account for most of the variation in a quote. Two balconies of identical size on the same street can differ by several thousand dollars.

Access is the one plainly geographic factor. An upper level balcony on a steep Woden or Weston Creek block may need scaffold or edge protection at $680 to $2,400, and a third floor apartment balcony means every bag of screed and every sheet of waste goes through a lift or up a stair. Those costs are real and they belong in the quote as their own line rather than buried in a rate. Access cost is predictable, so it belongs in the quote as a figure of its own.

Access is the one geographic variable that clearly moves a balcony figure across the ACT. A ground level terrace in Gungahlin or the Molonglo Valley is straightforward. A second storey balcony on a steep Woden Valley or Weston Creek block needs scaffold, and a third floor Canberra Central apartment means every bag of screed and every sheet of waste moves through a lift. Handyman services in the ACT can handle the small make good items afterwards.

Asbestos, Silica and Stripping an Older Balcony

Stripping an older Canberra balcony raises two health questions that have nothing to do with tile and everything to do with what is underneath it. The first is asbestos. Bonded asbestos cement sheet was used as an external substrate and in soffit linings under balconies for decades, and anything built before about 1990 needs testing before demolition rather than after. Testing runs $350 to $900 and licensed removal runs $85 to $180 a square metre.

The ACT also carries a legacy that no other jurisdiction has. Between 1968 and the late 1970s, loose fill amosite insulation was pumped into the ceiling spaces of upwards of a thousand Canberra properties, and fibres have since been located in roof voids, wall cavities, subfloor spaces and behind cornice lines. A property on the register shows a reflective warning tag at both the electricity meter box and the switchboard. Where a balcony soffit opens into a cavity on such a property, that matters. The territory publishes guidance for owners and contractors at the ACT loose fill asbestos site.

The second question is silica. Cutting tile, grinding a screed and cutting a slab all release respirable crystalline silica, and the workplace exposure standard is an eight hour time weighted average of 0.05 milligrams per cubic metre. The Work Health and Safety Regulation prohibits uncontrolled dry cutting of crystalline silica materials including tile, stone, concrete and masonry. Control runs as a hierarchy from elimination through continuous water flow and on tool extraction, with respiratory protection as the last line rather than the first.

On a balcony this is more manageable than indoors because the work is outside, and it is still not optional. Expect a wet saw, on tool extraction where a screed is being ground, and the area below kept clear while cutting happens. Work health and safety duties are administered by WorkSafe ACT, and training through the crystalline silica exposure prevention course has been required since July 2023. Ask whether the person cutting has completed it.

WorkSafe ACT enforces these duties on residential balconies rather than only on commercial sites, and a Canberra household can reasonably ask what dust control is planned before work starts. Rubbish removal across the ACT is usually a separate line on a balcony strip out, since tile and screed waste is heavy and priced by weight.

What to Look for in Balcony Tiling Quotes

A balcony quote that can be compared with another one names six things. The scope, meaning which layers are being replaced. The membrane standard and the product by manufacturer. Where the fall is coming from and what it will be. The threshold detail and the height available. The movement joint positions. And whether a flood test is included.

The fall is the question that separates serious quotes from optimistic ones, because on a flat slab the only honest answers are a screed, a threshold drain or grinding the slab. A quote that proposes a new membrane and new tile on a flat slab with no screed line item has not addressed the thing that caused the original failure. Ask where the water goes and listen for a specific answer.

Request the strip and investigation as a separate stage where the condition is unknown. Paying $45 to $90 a square metre to strip and then receiving a scope priced against what was found is more useful than a fixed price covering unknowns, and it is what a tiler who does external work regularly will propose. Verify the ABN and public liability insurance with the insurer directly, since tiling and waterproofing are not licensed occupations in the ACT and there is no licence number to check. The insurance certificate therefore carries more weight than it would in a licensed trade.

Getting the Best Value from Balcony Tiling

The cheapest Canberra balcony is the one that gets rebuilt correctly once, and the figures make that case without any persuasion. A full rebuild at $320 to $620 a square metre on a four by two metre balcony is $2,560 to $4,960. Tiling over at $95 to $165 is $760 to $1,320, and where the membrane underneath is at the end of its life that money is spent twice plus a ceiling repair at $650 to $2,400 in between. Spending once at the higher figure is cheaper than spending twice at the lower one.

Bundling helps a great deal on external work because mobilisation and access are a real part of the cost. Replacing a balustrade, treating the surface for slip resistance and attending to roof repairs on the same elevation while scaffold is up costs far less than three separate visits with three separate setups. Scaffold hire is charged by the period rather than by the task.

The last piece of value is documentary rather than physical. Photographs of the membrane at each coat, the flood test result, the product data sheets and a written scope naming AS 4654 cost nothing beyond asking for them. They are what makes a warranty claim possible in year four, and they are what a surveyor or a buyer asks for when the property is sold. A folder with the test result and the product sheets answers the question in a minute.

Sequencing matters more on a balcony than on an indoor floor because of the Canberra seasons. Where the balcony is not actively leaking, booking the work for October or March rather than July buys full working days and avoids the frost delays. Where it is leaking into a room below, a temporary cover now and the proper rebuild in spring is usually the better answer than a rushed winter job. Emergency water damage response in the ACT deals with the immediate problem while the permanent work is scheduled correctly.