Accessible and ageing in place bathrooms
Accessible bathroom renovations in Berwick for ageing in place, covering level entry showers, grab rail backing and turning space in older Casey homes.
An accessible bathroom comes down to three things: a shower you can walk into with no step, something solid to hold onto, and clear floor to turn around in. The structural parts cost the most, so they are worth building in the first time rather than retrofitting.
Retrofitting them later means opening the same walls and the same floor a second time, and paying for the protection, the strip out and the make good twice.
Two Berwick situations that come up most
The 1970s and 1980s brick veneer belt around the village core is full of original owners who are now in their seventies and eighties in the house they bought new. Those bathrooms have an enamelled steel bath with the shower over it, which means climbing over a 500 mm bath wall on a wet surface to have a shower. Removing the bath and building a level entry shower in its place is the single most useful change available in that housing stock, and on a concrete slab it is mostly a screed and drainage exercise rather than structural work.
Bryn Mawr, Bellbird Park, Parkhill and Eden Rise present the opposite problem. Those double storey homes put every bathroom upstairs. When stairs become the barrier, the answer is usually converting the downstairs powder room or laundry into a full accessible bathroom with a shower, which needs new drainage and a decision about where the waste can run. That is a bigger job than a bathroom refit and it is worth scoping early rather than in a hurry after a fall or a hospital discharge.
In the heritage core along High Street, and out towards Harkaway where the blocks are large and the homes are one off customs, the floors are timber and the levels vary across the room. A level entry shower there means dropping the floor structure, which is carpentry and may involve structural members. It is entirely doable and it is priced with a contingency rather than as a flat line.
What goes into the job
| Element | What it actually requires |
|---|---|
| Level entry shower | The floor substrate dropped or the whole room screeded to fall, so the shower floor sits flush with the bathroom floor. A linear grate along one wall gives a single direction of fall, which is easier to walk on than a four way fall to a centre waste |
| Grab rails | Solid timber noggins fixed in the frame behind the sheeting, before the wet area sheet goes on. Plasterboard anchors are not a substitute. Rails can be installed at the time or the backing left in place for later |
| Turning space | Clear floor with nothing projecting into it. A wall hung vanity and a cavity slider instead of a hinged door are the two changes that free the most space in a standard Casey bathroom |
| Shower seat | A fold down seat needs backing in the frame in the same way a grab rail does. A built in tiled bench is an alternative where the room allows it |
| Tapware position | Set so the controls can be reached from outside the water, rather than from directly under the rose. This is decided at rough in |
| Temperature control | The licensed plumber advises what is required at the outlet and sets the valve accordingly |
| Floor finish | A slip resistant tile suited to wet area use, chosen with the size of the tile in mind, because more grout lines gives more grip |
| Lighting and fan | Better light levels than a standard bathroom, and a fan ducted to outside air. Circuits are wired by licensed trades and the safety certificate is issued with the work |
Why does the backing go in before the sheeting?
The cheapest accessible bathroom is one where the backing was installed during a renovation that was happening anyway. Noggins behind the shower wall, beside the toilet and along the path from the door add very little to a job in progress, and they mean a grab rail can be fitted at any point in the next twenty years by removing a tile and screwing into solid timber.
If you are renovating a bathroom now and expect to be in the house long term, put the backing in whether or not you want rails today. That decision has to be made before sheeting, which is covered in the sequence on the full bathroom renovations page.
What has to be signed before anyone starts
Accessible work is often not a straight swap of old for new. Dropping a floor structure, widening a doorway in a wall that carries load, or putting a shower where there has never been one can each move the job into permit territory, and above a set dollar figure it needs a registered builder on a written contract. Both tests, the deposit caps and the warranty scheme sit on what the law requires.
Where the bathroom has to satisfy a specific requirement for a funded modification, that requirement comes from the occupational therapist’s report. Send it through with the enquiry and it is written into the scope and the quote rather than discussed after the work starts.
What goes wrong
- Grab rails fitted to plasterboard after the room is finished, which hold until the day they are needed.
- A level entry shower built with a fall that is too flat, so water runs out across the bathroom floor. The fall and the grate position are set before the screed, and the room is flood tested.
- A hinged door that swings into the clear floor space, undoing the rest of the layout.
- The bath pulled out of a pre 1990 bathroom before anyone samples the wall sheet. Testing comes first, and the removal rules are on the permit page.
- A shower rebuilt over an old membrane. If the existing shower has been leaking, see shower rebuilds and waterproofing, because the substrate has to come out either way.
What it costs
An accessible bathroom is a full renovation with structural and drainage work attached, so it sits in the $21,000 to $36,750 band on a concrete slab and moves toward $36,750 to $57,750 where the floor structure has to be altered or a doorway widened. Converting a downstairs powder room into a bathroom starts from the $6,000 to $14,000 band and rises once a shower and new drainage are added.
The lines that move most on this kind of job:
- Floor tile, where slip resistance narrows the choice: $90 to $190 per m2
- A wall hung vanity, supplied and installed: $500 to $3,700
- Glass, noting that many level entry showers use a single fixed panel rather than a full screen: $1,200 to $3,500
Every quote is fixed price and in writing, and the work is done by registered and licensed trades. Send through the details including the age of the house and whether you have an occupational therapist’s report.