A full bathroom renovation in Greenhithe, on Auckland’s North Shore

This is a full bathroom renovation our team completed in Greenhithe, on Auckland’s upper North Shore, in 2017. The photos show the finished room: a calm, grey, stone-look bathroom built around a walk-in glass shower and a freestanding bath, with every wall and the floor tiled from edge to edge.

Greenhithe sits on the upper Waitemata Harbour, and much of the suburb went up through the 1990s and 2000s as it grew. Bathrooms from that era are usually sound but dated, and homeowners here tend to want what this project delivered: a bright, low-maintenance room that feels current and stands up to daily family use.

What the finished bathroom includes

Reading it straight from the photos, the completed room brings together:

• Large-format grey tiles in a concrete look, run floor to ceiling on the walls and across the floor so the room reads as one continuous surface.
• A walk-in shower behind a semi-frameless glass panel and door, with a rail-mounted handheld shower and a recessed tiled niche for bottles.
• A white freestanding bath set against the tiled wall, with a wall-mounted mixer.
• A wall-hung vanity with a handleless drawer front, a white benchtop and a rectangular above-counter basin, kept off the floor so the room feels larger and is easier to clean under.
• A large frameless mirror, a chrome ladder-style heated towel rail, a close-coupled toilet, and a ceiling heat-lamp and extraction unit.

How we build a bathroom like this

A full bathroom renovation is more sequenced than it looks. Once the old room is stripped back, the order of work usually runs: rough-in for any moved plumbing and wiring, then the wall and floor linings, then waterproofing, then tiling, and finally the fit-off of tapware, the vanity, glass and fittings. Each stage has to be signed off before the next one covers it, because almost none of it can be inspected once the tiles are on.

Waterproofing: the part behind the tiles

Tiles and grout are not waterproof on their own. In a tiled bathroom, water is held back by a waterproofing membrane applied under the tiles across the shower, the floor and the wet walls. New Zealand Building Code clause E3 Internal Moisture requires that surfaces likely to be splashed or to get wet are impervious and easily cleaned, and it is backed by the Acceptable Solution E3/AS1, published by MBIE Building Performance. The wet-area membranes themselves are made and tested to AS/NZS 4858. Getting the membrane, the falls to the floor waste and the ventilation right is what keeps water out of the framing behind a room like this. Where a renovation relocates plumbing or touches structure it can involve Restricted Building Work, which needs a Licensed Building Practitioner, so consent questions are best checked with a licensed practitioner or Auckland Council rather than assumed.

Bathroom renovations across Greenhithe and the North Shore

We design and build bathrooms right across the North Shore, and a project like this shows what a full bathroom renovation handled by our in-house Auckland team involves from strip-out to fit-off. If you are weighing up a walk-in shower, a freestanding bath, or both in the one room, our guide on choosing between a bath and a walk-in shower is a good place to start, and the shower glass guide covers the panel-and-door setup you can see here. You can also see more of the bathroom renovations we deliver for North Shore homeowners, or get a rough figure from our bathroom renovation cost calculator.

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