GREENLANE, CENTRAL AUCKLAND

An older Greenlane home brought up to modern standards — kitchen, laundry, new ensuite and guest toilet

Completed October 2019

Quick answer: We took an older Greenlane home that hadn’t kept pace with how Joanne and Steve wanted to live and brought it up to modern standards — an open-plan kitchen and laundry, a brand-new ensuite that needed council consent, and a renovated guest toilet. This full home renovation in Greenlane, Central Auckland was completed in October 2019, and it was project managed from start to finish so the owners could leave it with us and get on with their lives.

An Older Greenlane Home That Needed to Catch Up

Joanne and Steve bought this Greenlane house as a rental. The plan was a permanent move to the UK, the property sitting in the background earning its keep while they were away.

Then the move fell through. What had been an investment was suddenly the house they’d be living in — and coming from a modern Auckland home, the gap showed.

In their words, it was fine. Just not modern. An older central-Auckland house with a closed-off kitchen, dated finishes, and — the thing that bothered them most — a single toilet.

“So when we decided that the move was not going to happen, we were stuck with this. I mean it was okay, it was just not very modern. We had come from a very modern house into an older house, so I wanted to add that modern touch to it. I think the toilet was the most important to us. We had come from a house that had multiple toilets to a place with just one toilet. So that was the kickstart of the whole renovation.”

Steve felt the same about the kitchen. “The kitchen was old, and coming from a new house — I mean we’re not cooking buffets at all, but we like a nice kitchen.”

So the brief took shape around two things: open up and modernise the kitchen, and solve the bathroom problem properly by adding a second toilet. From there it grew into a full home renovation, with the laundry, a new rumpus room and fresh flooring and paint folded in.

Here’s the part they rate most: they weren’t even in the country for a good chunk of it. They handed the house over and went on holiday, and the renovation carried on without them. As Joanne put it afterwards — knowing the work was getting done while they were on the beach was the best part of the whole thing.

Sound familiar? An older home you’ve ended up in rather than chosen, that needs dragging into this decade. It’s one of the most common reasons people in Auckland’s established suburbs pick up the phone.

The Kitchen and Laundry — Opening Up a Closed Room

The kitchen wasn’t falling apart. That’s often the harder case to make the call on. It worked — old laminate benchtops, yellowing cabinets with brown handles, a square-tiled splashback, tired flooring — but for two people coming out of a new build, “it works” wasn’t enough.

The bigger problem was that it was shut off from the rest of the house. So the first move was structural: we took out the wall between the lounge and the kitchen and turned two boxed-in rooms into one open space. That opened the door to a breakfast bar with stools, which suited how Joanne and Steve actually live far better than a closed galley ever did.

We replaced the ceilings across the lounge, kitchen and dining as well — not for looks, but so we could rewire and run downlights through the whole space. It’s the kind of full kitchen renovation in Auckland where the structural call up front does more than any finish chosen later.

The cabinetry and benchtop

• 16mm MRPB high-water-resistance carcass boards for all kitchen cabinets, custom built for the space
• DTC soft-close drawer runners and BLUM soft-close hinges
• A handleless setup across every cabinet and drawer for a clean, modern face
• 30mm engineered stone benchtop, custom built in a white marble look
• White subway tile splashback — modern, and easy to keep clean
• Blanco Silgranit sink, chosen for durability

Appliances and flooring

• Samsung 60cm 70L stainless oven, ceramic cooktop and stainless dishwasher
• Waste disposal unit and rangehood
• Havana Oak 966D vinyl sheet flooring — a wood look that’s easy to maintain and quietens footsteps underfoot

The laundry

• A storage area behind the lounge converted into a dedicated laundry
• The same Havana Oak 966D vinyl as the kitchen, for one continuous look
• A window between the lounge and laundry removed, walls and ceiling fully painted
• A Samsung 8.5kg front loader, with the same custom cabinets as the kitchen carried through

💡 Quick tip: A handleless kitchen looks sharp, but it lives or dies on the hardware behind the doors. Good soft-close runners and hinges — like the DTC and BLUM gear used here — are what stop a no-handle setup feeling cheap a year in.

BEFORE

AFTER

Solving the One-Toilet Problem — A New Ensuite

This was the part that started it all. The house had a separate toilet and a bathroom, and for a couple used to multiple toilets, one was the daily friction point.

The fix was to add a toilet into the bathroom and turn it into an ensuite — which meant a consent process. We handled that for Joanne and Steve so they didn’t have to deal with the council themselves. Adding a toilet brings new plumbing and drainage into play, and that’s exactly the kind of work where doing it by the book matters: it has to be consented, and it has to be signed off.

The standalone toilet didn’t go to waste. We renovated it as a guest toilet, tiled to match the new ensuite so the two spaces read as one decision rather than two. Adding a second bathroom is one of the more common Auckland bathroom renovation jobs we take on in older central-suburb homes.

The ensuite

• New vanity, mirror, towel rail and flooring
• A new toilet, installed through a council consent we managed end to end
• Shades of white on the toilet and vanity to keep a small space feeling open
• Black tapware and showerhead for contrast and a bit of character
• A glass-tiled shower

Floor and wall tiles

• Large 600×600 ALES Dark Grey Lappato floor tiles from The Tile Depot
• Big tiles in a small room mean fewer grout lines, fewer visual breaks, and a floor that reads larger than it is
• Blanco Brillo white gloss 300×600 wall tiles, also from The Tile Depot, to keep the room light rather than closed in

The guest toilet

• Fully renovated for guests, using the same wall and floor tiles as the ensuite for a consistent look

💡 Quick tip: Adding a toilet isn’t just a fixture swap — new drainage usually triggers a building consent. It’s worth getting that sorted properly from the start rather than discovering it at sign-off.

BEFORE

AFTER

From Two Storage Rooms to a Rumpus Room

Once the main renovation was done, Joanne and Steve kept going. Two separate storage rooms became one rumpus room — a proper den rather than dead space.

We demolished the wall between the two rooms to make a single space, took out three doors and a window, and put a new window in where it made more sense. New underlay and carpet went down, and we built a custom pantry beside the entrance so the storage they lost wasn’t gone, just better organised.

It’s a good example of how a renovation tends to go once people see what’s possible. You fix the thing that was bugging you, and then the room you’d written off as “just storage” suddenly looks like an opportunity.

One Team, One Point of Contact

A full home renovation has a lot of moving parts — design, demolition, building, plumbing, electrical, tiling, flooring, painting, and a council consent on top. The thing that made this one work for Joanne and Steve was that they didn’t have to manage any of it.

Every trade and every supplier ran through one project manager. That’s the part people who’ve had a bad renovation experience tend to value most — not chasing a tiler one week and a plumber the next, but having one person who keeps the whole job moving and sorts the problems when they turn up.

It’s also what let them go on holiday partway through and trust the work would be done when they got back.

Why Older Greenlane Homes Renovate Well

Greenlane sits in Central Auckland’s band of established suburbs, and a lot of its housing is from an era when kitchens were built as separate, closed-off rooms rather than part of the living space. That’s the single most common thing we change in homes like this one: take out the wall between the kitchen and the lounge, and the whole ground floor opens up.

Often that wall isn’t load-bearing, which means opening up the plan doesn’t touch the footprint or the roofline — exactly what happened here. Whether a specific wall can come out depends on whether it’s structural, so it’s the first thing to check, not assume.

The other Greenlane pattern is the single bathroom. Older central-Auckland homes were frequently built with one, and for the way people live now that’s usually the first thing on the list. Adding a second toilet or a new ensuite, as we did here, brings consent into the picture — but it’s well-trodden ground.

What a Full Home Renovation Like This Costs in Auckland

Every renovation is priced to its own scope. The size of the kitchen, whether walls come out, how much new plumbing a second bathroom needs, the materials you choose — they all move the number, and a multi-room job like Joanne and Steve’s covers far more ground than a single-room update. Rather than quote a figure that won’t match your home, use our kitchen renovation cost calculator to get a realistic Auckland estimate for your own project.

💡 Quick tip: On older homes, the cost you can’t see coming usually sits behind the walls — rewiring once the ceilings are down, or new drainage for an added toilet. Building a contingency in from the start beats finding it halfway through.

What Joanne and Steve Said

“Working with Kevin and the team was easy because we weren’t having to ring up different suppliers ourselves — it was like one team does this, another team does that, and everything was done for us under one roof. Kevin had a contact for everything, and the experience was simple. You hear a lot of horror stories about doing renovations and I was like, well, that was very easy.”
— Joanne, Greenlane

Thinking About Modernising Your Own Older Home?

Joanne and Steve took an older Greenlane house they’d ended up in by accident and turned it into a modern home they wanted to stay in — open kitchen, a second toilet sorted, the whole place lifted. If your established Auckland home is in the same spot, the starting point is a conversation about what your floor plan and budget will actually allow.

➡ Book your free in-home consultation with Superior Renovations
➡ See more about our Auckland home renovations
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Full Home Renovation in Greenlane — FAQs

Further Resources

1. More completed Auckland renovation projects
2. Real client stories from across Auckland
3. Joanne and Steve’s video testimonial — their renovation, in their words