What Yagoona's housing looks like
Yagoona sits immediately north-west of Bankstown with the Hume Highway cutting across it and an industrial strip along the highway frontage. Behind that strip the suburb is almost entirely single-storey residential, and it is one of the more varied housing mixes in the area.
Three broad groups:
- Privately built post-war brick and brick veneer, roughly 1950 to 1970, on standard blocks
- Former public housing, built to a repeated plan with tighter rooms and budget fixtures, much of it sold into private hands decades ago
- Newer infill — duplex pairs and secondary dwellings on the wider blocks, mostly from the last fifteen years
The first two groups are where almost all of our Yagoona work comes from. The third mostly needs a bathroom finished rather than renovated, which is covered on the rental and duplex page.
The original Yagoona bathroom
In both the private and the ex-public housing stock the room is small, usually around 1.6 to 1.8 metres by about 2.1 metres, with a pressed-steel bath on the long wall and a shower rose over it. The toilet is through its own door next to the bathroom and often has nothing in it but the pan and cistern.
Common features when we open one up:
- Wall tiles to about 1.4 metres, in cream, mint or a mottled beige
- Fibre cement sheeting behind the tiles, which gets tested before anyone cuts
- A laminate vanity, often a later replacement, with a single bowl and doors
- A high narrow window over the bath
- No exhaust fan, or a later one venting into the roof space
- Grout that has been doing the waterproofing's job for twenty years
What Yagoona households ask for
Two requests dominate, and they pull in opposite directions.
Combine the bathroom and the toilet. For a household of three or four, taking out the dividing wall gives one properly sized room instead of two cramped ones. It is the highest-value change available in this housing and it is described in full on the full renovations page.
Keep two, add a third. For a larger multi-generational household, losing the separate toilet is the wrong move. Those jobs usually become a renovated bathroom plus a new powder room or ensuite somewhere else in the house — see ensuites and small bathrooms.
Which answer is right depends entirely on how many people are in the house, which is why we ask that before we ask anything about tiles.
The investor side of Yagoona
A significant part of the suburb is tenanted, and we do a steady amount of between-tenancy work. The constraints are different from an owner-occupier job: a fixed vacancy window, a specification chosen for durability and repairability, and no appetite for anything that will generate a maintenance call.
The one thing we will not compress for a vacancy is the waterproofing cure. A membrane tiled over early is a bathroom that comes back in five years, which costs an investor far more than an extra two days of vacancy.
Council and approvals
Yagoona is in the City of Canterbury-Bankstown. Renovating inside an existing bathroom generally does not need a development application. Adding a bathroom, altering drainage or changing structure can, and secondary dwellings have their own approval path. We flag what applies at the measure.
Next step
A free measure, half an hour, evenings and Saturdays included. Rough price bands are on the price guide and the sequence is on how the job runs.
Renovation work is carried out in partnership with Coastal Renovation Group, a licensed NSW builder. Licence and insurance details are provided on request.