Apartment Renovations near you

Work backwards from the meeting calendar. Establish which category your work falls into, prepare the plans and the tradespeople's qualifications, and lodge the application with the strata manager or committee with enough lead time to reach a general meeting if a special resolution is needed. Scheme meetings are not frequent, and a bathroom that needs a special resolution can wait months for a vote that takes four minutes.

Once approval exists, the logistics become the project. A city apartment renovation is run through a single lift, a loading dock with booking windows, a building manager with permitted work hours, and neighbours on all six sides of you. Materials arrive in lift-sized loads, waste leaves the same way, and the trade sequence has to be tighter than it would be in a house because nobody can spread out.

Finish with the paperwork the scheme will ask for later: the approval, the by-law if one was made, the certificates for electrical and plumbing work, and photographs of anything that will be concealed. Strata records outlive owners, and the next dispute about a leak will be settled by whoever kept documents.

Beyond the statutory categories, every scheme has its own by-laws, and they bind you the way a contract does. They commonly set the hours trades may work, require a bond or insurance certificates before access is granted, restrict the use of the passenger lift, and prohibit certain noisy work on weekends. Ask for the current by-laws in writing rather than relying on what the neighbours say the rules are.

Work that alters or adds to common property generally requires the owners corporation's approval, and in many cases a by-law recording who will maintain the altered part in future. That last point is more important than it sounds: without it, a future owners corporation may find itself maintaining something a previous owner installed, and the argument about who pays tends to arrive at the worst possible moment.

A strata consent and a statutory building approval are separate things, and getting one does not give you the other. The owners corporation is deciding a property question about common property and by-laws. The building approval pathway, whichever one your state uses, is deciding a construction question about the Code. Structural change and anything that alters fire separation or egress will attract that second layer regardless of what the scheme says.

Because the approval systems and the building surveyor or certifier arrangements differ across the states and territories, confirm the pathway for your own state before the builder prices the job. The sequence that works is strata first, statutory approval second, trades third; doing it the other way round means paying for drawings that a general meeting may refuse.

This is why waterproofing sits in the major renovation category. A failed membrane in a renovated apartment does not damage only your lot; it damages the lot below and the common property in between, and the cost of rectification usually dwarfs the cost of the original bathroom. If the work was approved and properly documented, the argument is about the builder's workmanship. If it was never approved, the lot owner is exposed personally.

Keep the membrane installer's details, the product information, the certificates and dated photographs of the membrane before tiling. They are the only evidence that will exist once the tiles are down, and they are what your insurer, the owners corporation and any tribunal will ask to see. The Australian Consumer Law guarantees of due care and skill apply to the trades you engaged, on top of whatever the contract says.