Bathroom in a heritage overlay, Victorian terrace

The brief

“One bathroom for four people was not working. We knew heritage rules meant we could not do whatever we liked, and we wanted someone who had dealt with that before.”

What we found

Every renovation has surprises. Publishing ours is the point — this is what a variation actually looks like, and how it got handled.

• The party wall could not be chased for waste, so the new stack had to be run internally within a built-out bulkhead the builder framed for us.
• Upstairs floor depth was only just enough for the required fall — we set the shower waste against the external wall to gain the run we needed.
• The existing single bathroom's water supply was too small to serve two bathrooms at once, so the main was upsized from the meter.

Scope of works

• Feasibility assessment against heritage constraints
• New internal stack within a framed bulkhead
• Water main upsized from the meter
• Full rough-in and fit-off for the new upstairs bathroom
• Pressure balancing between the two bathrooms