Small Bathroom Renovation Cost QLD 2026 - Complete Pricing Guide

Small Bathroom Renovation Costs in Queensland for 2026

Rebuilding a small Queensland bathroom on the footprint it already occupies costs $14,000 to $23,000. Where the waterproofing is sound and the work is cosmetic, that drops to $6,000 to $11,500, relocating the toilet or the shower lifts the figure to $18,500 to $29,000, and a premium small bathroom with frameless glass and a stone top reaches $23,000 to $34,000. Expressed per square metre those figures come out at $4,100 to $7,000 for a small bathroom against $3,500 to $5,300 for a standard one, and that inversion is the thing most owners do not expect. The explanation is that a bathroom is mostly fixed cost. Membrane products are sold in whole units and the coats need their curing time no matter how little floor there is to cover.

A plumber will be on site three separate times and an electrician twice, and neither figure drops because the room measures three square metres instead of ten. The strip-out removes an identical fixture count. Quantity is the only thing that genuinely scales down, and quantity sits among the cheapest components of the job. Queensland has its own version of the substrate question, and it is the elevated timber floor. A great deal of the state's established housing is timber framed and raised on stumps, from genuine Queenslanders in inner Brisbane through to post-war highset houses across the south east and the regional centres. A bathroom on a suspended timber floor moves, and a waterproofing membrane does not forgive movement.

Underneath that same floor is the most common termite entry point in an Australian house, which makes a Queensland bathroom two problems stacked on top of each other. The wider project is covered in our bathroom renovation guide for Queensland. What Queensland does give owners is the lowest protection threshold in the country. Building work above $3,300 has to be carried out by a licensed contractor and has to be insured under the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme, which puts effectively every small bathroom inside the net. At the other end the state is the least forgiving in the country: cover for non-structural defects lasts six months from completion, and a complaint must reach the regulator inside seven months. Queensland owners therefore have excellent cover and very little time in which to use part of it, and a later section sets out exactly what that means in practice.

Elevated Timber Floors and What They Add to the Job

Think of a waterproofing membrane as a thin flexible skin glued to whatever lies under it. Movement in that substrate forces the skin to stretch, and sooner or later a junction or a penetration refuses. This is the central technical risk in a Queensland bathroom, because so much of the state's housing stock sits on timber bearers and joists carried on stumps, and a suspended timber floor is a moving thing by nature. Three failures recur. Stumps settle unevenly, so the floor develops a slope nobody designed and the falls to the waste end up fighting it. Joists at generous centres deflect when somebody stands on a tiled floor, and deflection cracks grout well before it cracks a tile.

And the timber immediately around an old floor waste or a former shower base is frequently the dampest material in the building, because that is where decades of minor leakage has been quietly going. Flooring that looks sound from above can be soft once the strip-out reaches it. The advantage Queensland has over states built on slabs is that all of this is visible. A highset house or a Queenslander on tall stumps lets somebody walk underneath with a torch, and a lowset timber house usually has enough clearance to crawl. Ten minutes under there before quoting turns a guess into a finding.

Rectification on a small bathroom, whether that means packing or replacing stumps, sistering joists to reduce deflection, or cutting out rotted bearers and flooring around the waste, typically runs $800 to $3,600. Detail sits under restumping, and clearing or adding underfloor ventilation while the floor is open is worth doing in the same visit.

Above the joists the substrate has to be a sheet product rated for wet areas, fixed at the spacings the manufacturer nominates, and primed with the primer the chosen membrane system specifies. Compressed fibre cement sheet is the usual answer over timber and costs $550 to $1,450 on a small bathroom including preparation, and where the finished level needs correcting first, floor levelling and screeding is priced separately.

Waterproofing itself is governed by AS 3740, the Australian Standard for waterproofing domestic wet areas, published through Standards Australia, and it sets the areas to be treated, the substrate preparation and the treatment of junctions and penetrations. Plasterboard inside a shower enclosure, or a membrane applied without the matching primer, both produce work that passes a glance and fails inside five years. Moving drainage is where the elevated floor earns its keep. On a slab the waste is cast in concrete and relocating it means a saw, an excavation and a repour. On a suspended timber floor a plumber can frequently work between joists from below, which is why the Queensland penalty for shifting a waste sits lower than it does in Perth or Adelaide. Relocating a toilet runs $2,000 to $4,600 and moving a shower or basin waste $900 to $2,600, against figures half again as high on slab construction.

Lowset brick houses on concrete slabs, common across the outer south east and the newer estates, invert the whole picture. No subfloor risk, no stumps, no termite pathway underneath, and no cheap way to move a waste. Neither situation is better than the other. They are different jobs, and a quote that has not established which one it is pricing has not finished being a quote.

Component Costs for a Queensland Small Bathroom

The table prices each component for a bathroom of three to four square metres in south east Queensland, split between a timber floored house on stumps and a lowset brick house on a slab, because those two situations diverge at most lines. Around 60 per cent of the total sits in work that vanishes behind the tiles and never gets looked at again.

Take the midpoints on a timber floored house where nothing moves and the total arrives near $16,500, which is where a large share of south east Queensland jobs finish. The slab column runs lower on substrate and higher on any drainage change, so the two paths cross depending on the brief. A quote that has not been under a timber floored house has left the rectification line empty and somebody will pay it later. Notice how modest a share of the total the owner actually chooses.

Vanity, toilet, screen, tapware and accessories together come to roughly a fifth of the job even at generous specification. That is the case for buying properly in a small room, since there is one of each and you stand within arm's length of all of them. Pricing for the wet trade sits separately under bathroom renovation plumbing.

The $3,300 Threshold and the Six Month Window

Queensland sets its protection threshold lower than any other state, and the consequence is that an ordinary small bathroom is covered where in some jurisdictions it would not be. Residential building work valued above $3,300 including materials, labour and GST requires a licensed contractor and cover under the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme, and the regulator specifically names bathroom fixture replacement above that figure as work requiring insurance. No small bathroom rebuild comes close to falling underneath it. The cover itself is substantial.

Standard entitlements run to $200,000 both before and after completion, with optional additional cover taking that to $300,000, and standard cover includes up to $5,000 of alternative accommodation and storage costs where the work cannot be finished. It responds where a licensed contractor fails to complete the work or fails to rectify defective work, which on a bathroom means the waterproofing, the drainage and the tiling are all backed by something more than a business name. Membrane detail sits in our bathroom waterproofing guide for Queensland. Then there is the timing, and this is the part Queensland owners most often discover too late. Cover for structural defects runs six years and six months, but it runs from the earliest of the contract date, the date the premium was paid, or the date work commenced, rather than from completion.

Cover for non-structural defects runs six months from the date the works were completed. Notice of a structural defect has to be with the regulator inside three months of that defect being spotted, and notice of a non-structural one inside seven months of the completion date. These periods are set by legislation and applied strictly. Six months is a single Queensland wet season. A bathroom finished in April is outside its non-structural cover by October, which is roughly when the first serious humidity of the new season starts testing grout, silicone, hardware and finish.

That is the practical argument for using the room hard and inspecting it deliberately across those first six months, instead of waiting to see whether anything surfaces on its own. Run the shower long and hot, check every internal corner where silicone has been run, study the grout where the water actually lands, open and close every drawer and hinge, and watch the skirting outside the bathroom wall. The distinction between structural and non-structural matters enormously here, because it decides whether you have six months or six and a half years. Defective waterproofing to a wet area is structural in character, which is the single best reason to photograph a membrane before it is covered. Grout that has cracked because a floor deflects may point to a structural cause; grout that has simply been finished poorly may not. Where there is any doubt, raising it in writing inside the first six months costs nothing and preserves both possibilities.

Contract level is set by value as well. Work between $3,301 and $19,999 falls under a Level 1 domestic building contract, and work at $20,000 or more under a Level 2. A Level 1 contract must name the parties including the contractor's licence number, describe the work and its location, state the contract price or how it is calculated, state the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme premium, give a completion date or the method of determining one, include any required plans and specifications, and carry the cooling-off notice. The contractor has to hand over a fully signed copy within five business days.

A Level 2 contract adds the Consumer Building Guide before signing, a start date, the contract price on the first page where it is a fixed amount, and the statutory warranties. Two things follow practically. Check the licence number on the contract against the public register maintained by the Queensland Building and Construction Commission before paying anything, since an unlicensed contractor on a job above $3,300 leaves you outside the scheme entirely. Then diarise the completion date plus six months, because that single date is the boundary of your non-structural cover and nobody else will remind you of it. Disputes that cannot be resolved are heard by QCAT.

Notifiable Work and the Paperwork Your Plumber Owes You

Queensland handles bathroom plumbing through a mechanism most owners have never heard of and every owner should ask about. Plumbing and drainage work on additions, extensions or renovations to kitchens and bathrooms is classed as notifiable work, which exempts it from local government permits and mandatory inspections and replaces both with a registration lodged by the licensed plumber. The trade-off is deliberate: less process up front, and a record afterward that only exists if the plumber files it. The obligation is specific. The plumber must register the notifiable work with the regulator within ten business days of issuing an invoice for that work, using Form 4 for private work, and the person lodging it must give a copy to the owner of the premises or to whoever engaged the plumber.

That copy is the document proving licensed plumbing work was carried out and recorded on your property, and it is the thing a purchaser's solicitor will eventually ask about. Plumbing on new construction is permit work instead of notifiable work, which is why a new house and a bathroom renovation follow different paths. For a renovation inside an existing building the notifiable route is the normal one, and the absence of an inspector means the only external check on the work is the plumber's own licence and the record they lodge. That raises rather than lowers the value of asking who is doing the plumbing.

What to do with this is short. At quoting stage, establish which licensed plumber has been engaged and confirm the work is going to be registered. Ask again at completion for the copy of the form. If it does not arrive, ask a third time, because ten business days from the invoice is not a long window and a plumber who has not lodged inside it has left a gap in your property's record. Licence classes and what each one permits are set out under plumbing services. The same principle applies to the electrical work, which is licensed separately and carries its own certificate.

Wet area electrical work follows AS/NZS 3000, which sets out zones around a bath and a shower and dictates what fittings may be installed where, and a small bathroom is where those zones bite hardest because everything is close to everything else. Ask for the electrical certificate and keep it with the plumbing form and the contract. Detail sits under electrical services. Keeping those three documents together with dated photographs of the membrane is the whole of what a Queensland owner needs to do to protect themselves. It takes an hour across the life of the job. Reconstructing any of it after a leak appears in year four is either impossible or expensive, and usually both.

Humidity, Mould and Why Ventilation Is the Whole Game

Queensland bathrooms fail differently from southern ones. There is no heating problem to solve and no cold surface for condensation to form on in the way a Melbourne winter produces. What there is instead is ambient humidity high enough for long stretches of the year that nothing in a bathroom dries on its own, and mould grows in conditions that would be marginal further south. A bathroom in Cairns or Townsville spends months where the outside air is already close to saturated, which means opening a window achieves very little. Ventilation is a Code requirement and not a comfort item, with the wet area and ventilation provisions maintained by the Australian Building Codes Board.

The consequence in this climate is that mechanical extraction carries the entire load, and it has to genuinely remove air from the building instead of moving it somewhere else inside the building. Vent a fan into the roof space and the moisture simply transfers to the timber overhead, which in this state is a considerably worse destination for it than mould in grout. Ducting to an eave or a roof cowl on a short run with few bends is the correct arrangement, and it costs very little extra at rough-in when the ceiling is already open. Sizing matters more here than it does in a temperate climate. A small bathroom has a small air volume, which saturates within a couple of minutes of a hot shower, so the fan needs the capacity to clear it and the run time to keep going after the shower stops. A timer or humidity sensor that keeps the fan running for fifteen or twenty minutes after somebody leaves the room does more for a Queensland bathroom than any upgrade of equivalent cost.

Options sit under bathroom exhaust and fan installation. Roof ventilation is the second half of the picture and is frequently ignored. Where the exhaust discharges into a hot poorly ventilated roof cavity, or where the cavity itself has no cross flow, moisture accumulates above the ceiling regardless of how good the bathroom fan is. Whirlybirds or ridge vents are a cheap addition while a roofer or electrician is already on site, and in a Queensland house they earn their money on summer heat as well as bathroom moisture.

The cowls and terminations are covered under roof ventilation and whirlybird installation. Under the floor matters too in a timber house. A poorly ventilated subfloor holds moisture against bearers and joists, which softens timber, attracts termites and keeps the underside of a bathroom floor permanently damp. Clearing vents, adding them, or fitting a subfloor fan costs little and fits naturally alongside a bathroom renovation, since the floor is open anyway. Where mould has already established itself, bathroom mould removal and prevention covers the treatment.

A severe outbreak behind sheeting or in a ceiling cavity is a job for mould remediation and not a spray bottle, and it should be resolved before new linings go up. Painting over a colony or sealing it behind new sheet simply moves the problem out of sight while it continues, and in a climate this humid it will find its way back through grout or a ceiling join within a year or two. Anybody quoting a bathroom in a house with existing mould should be asked whether their price includes dealing with it or assumes somebody else will.

Specification choices follow from all of this. Larger format tiles with fewer grout lines give mould less to colonise, and rates by format sit under tiling services. Silicone at internal corners instead of grout accommodates movement and can be replaced without disturbing tiling, which is the sort of maintenance shower regrouting and leak repairs deals with. A wall-hung vanity with clear floor beneath it dries where a floor-standing cabinet traps moisture at the kickboard. None of these decisions costs much extra, and all of them are easier to make before the tiler starts than afterward.

Termites, Wet Areas and the Inspection Worth Paying For

A bathroom is the most attractive part of a Queensland house to a termite colony, because it combines the two things termites need in one place: timber and moisture. A slow leak at a floor waste, a failed shower membrane or a damp subfloor beneath a wet area produces exactly the conditions that turn a passing foraging party into an established problem. This is why a bathroom renovation in Queensland is also a termite decision, whether or not anybody raises it. The useful thing about a renovation is that it is the only moment the evidence is visible. Once the old tiles and sheeting come off, the wall framing and the floor structure around the wet area are exposed for a day or two, and that is the single best opportunity in the life of a house to see whether anything has been eating it. Booking an inspection to coincide with the strip-out costs $250 to $450 and is worth it on any timber framed Queensland house, because damage found then is cheap to repair while the wall is already open.

What a builder finds ranges from nothing at all to a wall plate that has been hollowed out behind intact-looking sheeting. Repairing damaged framing while the bathroom is stripped typically adds $600 to $3,000 depending on extent, which is a small proportion of the figure the same repair reaches once the room is complete and has to be opened up again. Both sides of that work are covered under termite inspection and treatment and termite damage repairs. Prevention deserves a thought at the same moment.

AS 3660 covers termite management for buildings, and a renovation that disturbs part of an existing barrier or chemical treatment is a renovation that has potentially created a gap in it. Where a house has a managed system, whoever maintains it should know the bathroom is being opened, and where it does not, the strip-out is a sensible time to consider one. A physical barrier or a treated zone installed while the floor is accessible is much cheaper than retrofitting one later. The moisture side of prevention matters as much as the chemical side, and it is free.

Correct falls to the waste so water leaves and not sits, a membrane detailed properly at every junction and penetration, silicone maintained at internal corners, and a subfloor that ventilates will together do more to keep termites out of a bathroom than any product will. Termites follow moisture, and a dry bathroom is a comparatively uninteresting one. One practical note on sequencing. Have the inspection booked before the strip-out instead of after it, because once the trades are moving the room is only open for a short window and a demolition crew will not recognise what they are looking at. An inspector who arrives on the right afternoon can assess exposed framing that will be covered again within days, and a general pest and termite inspection booked for that afternoon is worth several routine ones.

Body Corporate Bathrooms and Community Titles Schemes

A large proportion of Queensland's smallest bathrooms sit in community titles schemes, and in this state the governing body is a body corporate operating under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997. A lot owner planning a bathroom renovation has two separate questions to answer: what falls inside the lot and what is common property, and what the scheme's by-laws require before anybody starts. Common property generally takes in the structural elements of the building along with services passing through a lot to serve other lots, which in practice means the slab, structural walls, and the vertical stacks carrying water and waste between units. In many older schemes the original waterproofing membrane falls within that definition too, which makes disturbing it a matter for the body corporate rather than a decision the lot owner makes alone.

Price an apartment bathroom without having read the by-laws and you have priced a house bathroom that happens to be several storeys up. The conditions themselves cost money. Most schemes fence the working day into set hours, want the lift booked and padded, nominate a level of contractor insurance before anybody comes through the door, and require water shutdowns to be scheduled so the neighbours are not caught out. Restrict lift access to a three hour window and a strip-out a house would absorb in one day spreads across two or three, with the labour billed across all of them. Allow an additional $1,400 to $3,400 on a small scheme bathroom for these conditions, plus roughly a week of program. Queensland's older walk-up blocks bring a further consideration worth raising before the job is priced.

Plenty of two and three storey blocks put up in the 1960s and 1970s run a single vertical stack past bathrooms sitting one above the next, and touching that stack is common property work by definition. A plumber who discovers a degraded shared stack midway through a job is looking at a body corporate matter, not a variation, so the sensible order is to have the stack looked at first. What shared services typically involve is set out under body corporate plumbing. Dispute resolution in Queensland runs through its own channel and not straight to a tribunal.

The Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management provides dispute resolution services for scheme disputes, including conciliation and adjudication, and general guidance for owners is published by the Queensland Government. That is a different path from a building dispute with a contractor, which runs through the regulator and then to the tribunal, so a renovation that goes wrong in a unit can generate two separate matters travelling in two directions. Lot owners hold one card almost nobody thinks to play. Your building has very likely had a bathroom done in it before, and whoever held that job came away knowing how the stacks run, when trades are allowed in, and which certificates the manager will not proceed without. One call to the body corporate manager surfaces that name, and it arrives attached to a keener quote and a shorter program more often than not.

South East Queensland and Regional Cost Comparison

Queensland is decentralised in a way no other eastern state is, with several genuinely independent regional economies instead of one capital and a periphery. That produces a price spread driven by local labour markets and freight distance instead of by a simple gradient away from Brisbane. Mining and resources wages pull rates up in the central and north west, tourism demand competes for trades along the coast, and the tropical north adds both freight and a wet season that constrains when work can happen.

Housing stock drives the metropolitan pattern more than labour supply does. Inner Brisbane carries a premium because the buildings are demanding rather than because trades are scarce, and a Paddington or Ashgrove Queenslander may present a bathroom on high stumps, a floor that has settled across a century, and access only up a set of external stairs too narrow for a wheelbarrow. Toowoomba shows the same effect at lower absolute rates, since its older timber housing brings stump and subfloor rectification into a large share of jobs. The Logan and Ipswich corridor sits at the bottom of the range for the opposite reason. Housing there is largely newer slab construction where services sit where you expect them, and enough renovators chase the work that a clearly briefed job brings back prices you can actually line up beside each other. The coastal strips invert it again: the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Noosa carry holiday letting demand pulling against the same pool of trades, and their premium reflects seasonal scarcity more than any difficulty in the buildings themselves.

North of Rockhampton two separate forces take over. Resource sector wages set a floor under what any trade will accept, and freight sets the ceiling on how fast anything arrives. Both hit a small bathroom harder than a large one, because a room needing six or seven separate trade attendances repeats the travel every time while spreading it across very little floor area. Cyclone region requirements add a further layer for any glazing being replaced.

The far north adds a seasonal constraint worth planning around and not fighting. Between roughly December and March, freight timetables lengthen, access to some areas becomes unreliable, and ambient humidity makes membrane curing slower and less predictable. Scheduling a bathroom for the dry season is not always possible, but where it is, it removes the most common cause of a Queensland program blowing out. The general countermeasure holds everywhere in the state and matters most here: have every fixture physically on site before the strip-out begins, because a room this size leaves the trades nothing else to be getting on with while a delivery is chased.

What to Look Out For When Getting Small Bathroom Quotes in Queensland

Small bathrooms produce a broader range of quotes than any other renovation, for the simple reason that the room appears quotable from the doorway. Done on that basis, a $16,000 estimate has become $23,000 by week three, and every dollar of the gap gets attributed to something a half hour with a torch would have turned up beforehand. Prices that survive belong to the builder who took a tape to the walls, tallied the fittings, got underneath the house, and put in writing what changes if the timber by the waste turns out soft. Open with the licence number and check it. Any residential building work above $3,300 requires a licensed contractor, and the licence number has to appear on the contract.

Verifying it against the public register takes two minutes and matters more in Queensland than almost anywhere, because an unlicensed contractor on a job above that figure puts you outside the Home Warranty Scheme entirely and no amount of paperwork afterward will put you back inside it. Tiling quantities next, because that line holds more money than any other and thins out more quietly than any other. What square metre figure has been allowed for walls, and what for floors. Where tiling runs to the ceiling, anything under 18 square metres of wall allowance means the tiling stops early or the estimator measured in two dimensions. A lump sum with no area behind it is not comparable with anything. Ask whether anybody has actually been under the house.

On a timber floored Queensland home this is the question that separates a firm price from a hopeful one, and unlike a slab state the answer is genuinely knowable in ten minutes. Stump settlement, joist deflection and rot around an old waste all change the price and all reveal themselves to a torch. Where rectification is needed, ask for a figure, not a note saying subject to inspection. Raise the termite inspection at quoting instead of leaving it to chance.

The strip-out is the only moment the framing around a wet area is visible, and an inspection booked for that window tells you more about the building than any other inspection ever will. Ask the builder to coordinate it, and ask what happens to the program and the price if damaged framing turns up. Put the waterproofing line under real scrutiny. Name the membrane system, whether it is Ardex, Davco, Mapei or another range, name the primer that system requires, count the coats, state the curing interval, and check the tiler's booking falls outside it. In a humid Queensland summer curing takes longer than the label suggests, and a program that assumes otherwise is a program that will either slip or cut the interval short. A suspiciously low waterproofing figure generally means somebody intends to squeeze it between other trades.

Confirm who does the plumbing and that the work will be registered as notifiable work. The licensed plumber has to lodge the registration within ten business days of invoicing and give you a copy, and that copy is your record that licensed plumbing work happened on the property. Where a builder cannot name the plumbing firm, the plumbing has been folded into a general labour figure, which is exactly where a price gets quietly shaved. Ask where the exhaust fan discharges, and do not accept a vague answer. A unit venting into the roof space moves the moisture rather than removing it, and a roof cavity in this state is a far worse place for that moisture to end up than the shower it came from.

Ask whether a timer or humidity sensor is included, because in this climate run-on time after the shower does more than fan capacity alone, and units from the likes of Ventair and IXL differ on whether that control comes built in. Break the fittings out individually. Bundle tapware, shower set, pan and vanity into one figure and all four disappear, with the choosing left to whoever happens to be at the counter. Ask for model numbers or a per-item allowance you can price at retail yourself.

Nothing in a room this size is viewed from more than a metre away. Check the screen specification separately too, since framed, semi-frameless and frameless sit at very different prices and change how the room reads more than any other single item, and shower screen installation and repairs runs through each type. Three prices is the floor, and all three have to cover identical scope. One page of brief before anyone visits: tiling height, drainage staying or moving, niche or none, which exhaust and where it vents, vanity width, screen type, door swing.

Every builder receives that identical page. Ask as well about the items nobody volunteers, which on a small job are a larger share of the total than on a big one: where the skip goes and whether the council wants a permit for it, who lays protection down the hallway, and who repairs the doorframe that gets knocked about getting the old bath out. A separate figure for demolition and waste removal is a fair thing to request. The consumer guarantees override everything above them and cannot be contracted out of. Work has to be performed with due care and skill, and it has to be fit for the purpose it was engaged for. These guarantees operate nationally under the ACCC.

Practical Tips for Getting Small Bathroom Quotes in Queensland

Resolve the drainage question first, before a single phone call. Everything else in a small bathroom amounts to preference with a price tag on it, whereas shifting a floor waste or a soil connection restructures the whole trade sequence and explains most of the spread between your highest and lowest quote. Working between joists from below is usually possible on a suspended timber floor, which keeps the Queensland penalty for shifting a waste under what the slab states charge, though $2,000 to $4,600 to move a toilet remains real money. Get under the house yourself if you can do it safely. Five minutes with a torch and a phone camera answers three questions: are the stumps beneath the bathroom still doing their job, do the joists look close enough together, and has the timber near the existing waste gone dark and spongy.

Answers in hand, you are collecting quotes on the building you actually own instead of the one everybody hopes it is, and on a highset house the whole exercise is quicker than making a coffee. Book the termite inspection for the day the strip-out happens. It is the only point in the life of the house when the framing around the wet area is exposed, and finding damage then means repairing it while the wall is already open. An inspection costs $250 to $450 and repairing framing at that point costs a small proportion of what the same job runs to after the tiling is down. Calculate the walls before anyone quotes. Floor area multiplied by four lands close enough for tiling run to the ceiling, and you then have a figure to hold every allowance against.

The tile decision resolves itself at the same time, because $85 a square metre becomes either a $2,200 commitment or a $1,000 one depending on that area, and it is better known before the showroom visit than after. Diarise the completion date plus six months and plus seven months. Non-structural cover under the Home Warranty Scheme runs six months from completion and a complaint has to reach the regulator within seven, and those periods are applied strictly. Use the room hard during that window, inspect the silicone at every internal corner and the grout where the shower runs hardest, and raise anything doubtful in writing while the option still exists.

Ask for three documents and keep them together: the signed contract showing the licence number, the copy of the notifiable work registration from the plumber, and the electrical certificate. Add your own photographs of the membrane before it was tiled. That set takes an hour to assemble across the whole job and is either impossible or expensive to reconstruct afterward. Tie money to finished stages. Release a payment on the strip-out, another on the membrane, another on the tiling and the last on fit-off, and neither side ever has an incentive the other does not share, with your outlay never running ahead of what has actually been built.

Resist a large payment up front on a job this size. Order every fixture early and store it yourself if you have room. Three weeks turns into six most often because a vanity or a screen went on backorder, and a room this size gives the trades nothing to fill the gap with. North of Rockhampton this doubles in importance, since freight and not stock is usually the constraint. Price the vanity and basin installation on its own and you will know immediately whether the allowance you have been given is generous or thin.

Settle the exhaust and the tapware positions before the first trade visit. The fan type, its discharge route and any timer or sensor all have to be set before the ceiling is patched, and reversing that decision means opening finished work. Tapware positions are fixed at rough-in for the same reason. In this climate the extraction decision matters more than any finish you will choose. Settle what the vanity top will be made from, since engineered stone remains a trap. From 1 July 2024 nobody in Australia may make, supply, process or install these benchtops, panels or slabs, whatever their silica reading, with enforcement in this state resting with WorkSafe Queensland.

Still permitted: porcelain and sintered products below one per cent crystalline silica, natural stone, solid surface, timber. Pulling out a top that is already there stays lawful, though it counts as controlled work, so settle how that happens before booking the strip-out. On asbestos the position differs from most states: a Queensland home owner may remove 10 square metres or less of non-friable bonded material themselves, and above that a certificate obtained through an approved course is required, while friable material always requires a licensed removalist. Guidance sits with the Queensland asbestos authority, and testing is covered under asbestos testing and inspection.