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We loved the location and the size of the block, but not the bathroom.
Tom and his wife, Amelia, purchased their Leederville property back in 2016. They loved the location and the nice big block, but the house was built in 1913 and your average house didn’t really have big bright bathrooms back in those days. By the time Tom and Amelia arrived on the scene, the bathroom had seen better days. It had been redone at some point during the life of the house, but it was done on the cheap or DIY, and simply just not done properly at all. To put it as nicely as possible, the bathroom was just awful!
We needed to go with a full-service builder.
Tom and Amelia knew the renovation was going to be more likely an entire new room build. Everything would need to be gutted, so it was going to be a reasonably big and arduous project. They decided they needed a full-service builder, not just someone who did small jobs or minor alterations. They had seen a bathroom that One Design and Construct had built at a house in Beaconsfield and they really liked what they saw. Plus their friends in Beaconsfield had recommended John and the team from 1DC. So when Tom and Amelia were ready to get a builder in, One Design was one of the builders asked to provide a quote. Tom and Amelia thought some of the builders seemed like a ‘one-man show’ kind of operation, and in the end, they decided to go with John and 1DC, who impressed them as being a bit more seasoned and professional, and certainly able to handle the scope of the work.
John’s nice. He’s jolly. He’s always smiling, always happy.
“When he came here to talk through what we had in mind for the first time, he was onto it straight away. He had his measuring tape out on that first meeting, that sort of thing. We have a family friend who did up the design, and John made sure the spaces worked properly from the start. So when the build started, we were fortunate we had a place to go and stay. We just got out of the way of the builders and let them go about their work. No delays, and the job was finished right on time,” said Tom
Finding that window.
The bathroom is south facing, so prior to the renovation it really didn’t get a lot of light. One of the major considerations in the design and building process was to make sure the room got as much natural light as possible. They wanted a bigger window, but because Tom and Amelia’s home has a lot of heritage features, finding a new window to fit into the bathroom was a challenge. They went trolling salvage yards and finally found one that matched pretty much perfectly. It was old and didn’t work as well as it should, but the team at 1DC sanded it back, refurbished it with new weights and pulleys, and now it is a beautiful feature in the new bathroom that looks like it’s always been there. And now, along with the VELUX skylight the boys installed, the new bathroom is bathed in natural light.
Any recommendations for people thinking of renovating their home?
“Think about it carefully, because it’s all the finer details that really make, well for us a bathroom, but for any space really. We had a lot of considerations. We have a swivel nozzle on the bathtub, just so kids protect their heads when they’re bathing. Because bath time’s playtime. We’re able to swing that back around out of the way. So it’s just those small little details that if you hadn’t thought about those at the time, to replace that later on would just be really quite difficult.”
What was the most delightful thing about working with John and his team?
“Probably the quality of the work. Everything was done pretty much perfectly. We haven’t had any issues with any of the workmanship or anything like that, which you would almost expect in a job this big, because there’s a lot of little things that can go wrong. And particularly because we added a few things along the way, that we thought of at the time would be useful. No issues involved with that. Everything was able to be done as we required. And it’s some of the stuff that you wouldn’t see. There are power points in the drawers, for example, that although John didn’t know about them at the beginning, he had no issues with getting those put in. There’s certainly a high level of craftsmanship through the team that he employs. A lot of communication. Very accommodating for all of our requests and more than happy for us to handle some of the things. We sourced all the tiles and a few other little extras because we knew exactly what we wanted. We wanted to add a little bit of pop and colour just to make sure it didn’t feel like a sterile operating theatre.”
