Laundry Renovations Canberra

The laundry is the room people put up with. It is usually the smallest space in the house, it was designed around a twin-tub, and everything since has been worked around it. A renovation turns an outdated, inefficient room into one that does its job without an argument.

We do two kinds of work here: a complete renovation of an existing laundry, and the installation of a new one where there was not a proper laundry before. Apex Bathrooms ACT is family-owned, and Oleg runs each job himself from the first visit to the final clean.

Five signs, and one of them is usually enough.

• Your laundry is outdated, or it has nowhere near enough storage.
• The layout does not use the space, so you work around it rather than in it.
• You are having problems with the plumbing or the appliances.
• The household has outgrown the laundry it has - a growing family, a second washing machine's worth of work, a room that was never sized for it.
• You are getting the house ready to sell, and the laundry is the room a buyer walks through last and remembers.

• Storage that holds what you own. Built-in cabinets, wall shelves, pull-out organisers. Vertical space rather than floor space, because there is rarely any floor space.
• A layout built for the workflow. Where the basket lands, where the machine door opens, where wet things go before they go out. Those three decide the plan more than the dimensions do.
• Appliances and plumbing that save water and energy, and taps and waste sized for the machines you are actually buying.
• A room that looks finished, which is worth money when the house is sold and worth something every day before that.

The work runs to the same shape as a bathroom, at a smaller scale. We strip the old room back, sort the plumbing and electrical, waterproof where the standard calls for it, tile, and install the cabinetry, benchtop, trough and appliance spaces.

Benchtops need to take heat, water and a dropped iron. Flooring needs to be water-resistant, durable and easy to clean, which is why tile and vinyl are the usual answers. Lighting is the thing most often forgotten: a single centre batten leaves you sorting a dark wash in your own shadow. Ventilation is the other one, and there is more on it in our guide to ventilation and keeping a wet room dry. Tiling and splashbacks are part of what we do in-house, so the same crew handles the wall and floor tiling and the splashback behind the trough.

Some of a laundry renovation can be done yourself. The electrical, the plumbing and the cabinetry should not be - not because they are difficult to attempt, but because they are expensive to get wrong in a room that is wet every day.

In the ex-government houses and 1960s to 1980s brick homes through Belconnen, Tuggeranong, Woden and the Inner North, the laundry is almost always original: small, with minimal plumbing, and treated as an afterthought when the house was built.

Two things tend to turn up when that room comes apart. The first is the waterproofing, or the absence of it - the original work predates the standard the job is now done to. The second is capacity: the plumbing was sized for one appliance and a tub, and modern machines and a benchtop over the top of them need more. We look for both at the quoting stage rather than discovering them mid-job, so the number on your quote is the number.