Where to Splurge and Save on Joinery Design for a Bathroom Renovation
As with any home renovation project, updating your bathroom can be a costly undertaking. While it’s tempting to choose all luxury materials, custom joinery design and finishes for your space, these costs add up quickly to blowing your budget before the work has even begun.
Budgeting for your bathroom renovation and assigning costs to each step of the process can help you identify which aspects you can afford to pull back on and where it’s worth investing top dollar.
Let’s break down the different line items for your bathroom renovation budget and how much you should allocate to each one.
Vanity
Storage is crucial for bathrooms, particularly those in smaller homes or shared by families. With this in mind, your vanity and joinery design is a crucial investment.
To create the illusion of a bigger bathroom, opt for a floating vanity unit with under-sink cupboards. If your current cabinets are deep and hard to make use of, consider switching to pull-out drawers.
Medicine cabinets above the sink can also be a clever way to integrate storage. Be sure to take the cupboards to the ceiling to prevent an awkward gap on top that will accumulate dust.
Tiles
As a wet room, tiles are an essential part of your bathroom’s look and feel. How big your bathroom is and how high you want to take the tiles up the wall will have the biggest impact on costs.
Visit showrooms and compare the cost-per-square-metre of different tile options to see what fits within your budget. Consider using a combination of tiles to achieve the look you want.
A hidden cost in tiling comes in the form of labour. Intricate laying patterns like mosaic and herringbone certainly look great, but these designs will cost more to install.
Plumbing
The plumbing in your bathroom is definitely an area in which you don’t want to take shortcuts. A poor waterproofing and installation job now can cost thousands in structural damage down the track and be far more expensive to fix than the costs of a professional plumber.
Moving the position of plumbed-in elements like the bath or toilet will increase your budget significantly, so consider whether a new bathtub or combining this with your shower, for example, would suit your new layout instead.
Electrical
Many homeowners forget the importance of electrical elements in their bathroom renovation, but it’s an important area to plan for in your budget.
Create an electrical layout of your bathroom to understand better what’s already in place in your joinery design and what you might need to install. Think extraction fans, under-cabinet lighting, powerpoints, heated towel racks and illuminated mirrors.
While you don’t want to cut corners on installation costs, you can look for cost-effective alternatives for your light fixtures to keep costs down.
Layout
As a starting point, measure up your bathroom and plot out your plumbing points to get an idea of the basic layout you’re working with.
If your current space only has a single sink, consider whether you want to expand your joinery design to account for a double vanity. Perhaps you want to change from an enclosed shower to a walk-in design. All of these changes will impact the costs of your renovation accordingly but may also mean you get more functionality and enjoyment from it.
Any structural work to your bathroom will involve a higher cost, as you’ll need to account for additional labour on top of your materials. Similarly to moving around the plumbing, consider if these changes can be achieved in another way if you are working with a smaller budget.
Having helped to renovate hundreds of homes across Sydney and the Central Coast, Apollo Joinery Group has over 50 years experience in transforming spaces through custom joinery solutions. Contact us to see how we can help to update your bathroom within your budget.
In the meantime, access our 2021 Design Trends eBook for inspiration.
