A bathroom renovation on Dover Street, Williamstown — we handled the electrical side of the fit-out while the room was stripped back, which is the only sensible time to do it. Once the tiles are on, every one of these jobs gets harder and more expensive.
Lighting. Three LED downlights set around the room rather than a single light in the middle of the ceiling. It is a small change in layout that makes a real difference day to day: light falls into the shower, onto the vanity and across the floor, instead of throwing your own shadow over the mirror while you are standing at it. Warm-white output keeps the room feeling like a bathroom rather than an operating theatre.
Exhaust fan. A flush ceiling fan sits between the shower and the vanity, where the steam actually is. In an older Williamstown home this matters more than people expect — moisture that is not pulled out of the room ends up in the plaster, the paintwork and the window frames. If you are renovating, insist the fan is ducted properly to outside rather than simply dumping into the roof space, which just moves the problem somewhere you cannot see it.
Power. A double power point at the vanity, clear of the basin and the splash zone, so the hairdryer, shaver and electric toothbrush all have somewhere to live. It is the single most common thing missing from an older bathroom, because when these houses were built nobody was charging anything in them.
Bathrooms are the most tightly regulated room in the house electrically. The wiring rules divide the room into zones measured from the shower and the basin, and what may be installed where — along with the protection rating of each fitting and RCD protection on the circuits — is governed by those zones. It is not a room for guesswork, and it is genuinely not a room for a handyman.
The practical advice, if you have a bathroom renovation coming up: get your electrician in during rough-in, before the plasterer and well before the tiler. Fittings, fan position, switch location and power points are all cheap to get right at that stage and awkward to change afterwards.
