The corridor with a trough in it
Walk into most Hills project homes and the laundry is a narrow room between the garage and the kitchen with a trough, a tap set, a space for a washing machine and a broom cupboard if you are lucky.
It works, in the sense that clothes get washed. What it does not have is anywhere to put anything down.
In a family house running most days, that missing bench is the whole problem, and fixing it is usually cheaper than people expect because it touches no plumbing.
What the room actually needs
Continuous bench. Somewhere to fold and sort. In a galley laundry this usually means running a bench over the washing machine and dryer, which requires a front-loader rather than a top-loader but transforms how the room works.
Storage with real volume. Overhead cupboards for detergent bought in bulk, a tall unit for the vacuum and the mop. Project-home laundries typically have one small cupboard and open shelves that hold almost nothing.
A deeper trough. The most common regret is a shallow tub. A 45-litre trough takes a mop bucket and handles soaking; a 35-litre one often will not.
A floor you can treat carelessly. Tile with slip resistance rather than a finish chosen to look good in a photo.
None of that is expensive. All of it is a matter of specifying for the household rather than for the display home.
The dryer question
More laundry problems come from moisture than from anything else. A vented dryer pushes a large volume of warm wet air into the room, and in an enclosed internal laundry it has nowhere to go.
Either duct the vented dryer properly to outside, or use a condenser or heat-pump dryer that collects the moisture instead. In an internal laundry with no external wall — common in the Hills — the second is usually the only sensible answer.
Decide before the cabinetry is designed. It affects the joinery and the power layout.
Staying in place
The laundry in most Hills houses is already sensibly located: close to the garage, close to the bedrooms, on an external or near-external wall. There is rarely a compelling reason to move it.
On a slab, that is fortunate, because moving it would mean cutting concrete for new waste. The better brief is almost always to improve the room where it is — bench, storage, trough, tiling, lighting and ventilation — rather than to relocate it.
Getting the appliances right
Two practical points that decide whether a laundry works, and both are settled before joinery is drawn.
Front-loader or top-loader. A continuous bench over the appliances — the single change most people want — requires front-loaders. If you are committed to a top-loader, the bench has to go elsewhere and the layout changes completely. Decide this first, not last.
Where the dryer goes. Stacked above the washer saves a metre of floor and suits a galley. Side by side under a bench is easier to use and needs the width. Wall-mounted brackets are a third option in a tight internal laundry.
Measure the appliances you actually own or intend to buy, rather than assuming standard dimensions. Laundry appliances vary more than people expect, and a bench built to the wrong height by 20mm is a permanent irritation.
Cabinetry
Off-the-shelf carcasses with a decent laminate or compact-laminate top will outlast the room's usefulness at a fraction of custom joinery with a stone top. Carcasses should be a moisture-resistant board at minimum.
Custom earns its money in awkward spaces — under a stair, into a sloped ceiling, or where appliance dimensions are unusual. In a standard Hills galley laundry, off-the-shelf is genuinely the right answer for most households.
Doing it with the bathroom
If the bathroom or the ensuite is being renovated, get the laundry quoted at the same time. The marginal cost is well below standalone, and the elapsed time added to the program is small.
It is the least glamorous recommendation on this site and the one people thank us for most.
The laundry as a second powder room
A layout worth considering if the house has only one toilet downstairs, which is common in older Hills project homes.
Many laundries have enough width to take a wall-hung toilet and a small basin at one end, separated from the washing zone. It uses drainage that is already there, it adds a genuinely useful facility for a household with guests or kids playing outside, and it costs a fraction of building a powder room from scratch elsewhere.
The constraints are honest ones. It needs enough length that the toilet is not sharing space with the trough, it needs the waterproofing extent reconsidered, and it needs proper separation to be pleasant rather than awkward.
It does not suit every laundry. Where it does, it is the cheapest additional toilet you will ever add to a house on a slab.
Program
Same sequence as any wet area — strip-out, rough-in, screed and falls, waterproofing, tiling, fit-off — across one to two working weeks standalone.
Call 02 5944 1412 or send the details through.
The rest of what we do
Questions people ask before they commit
How much does a laundry renovation cost?
About $8,000 to $19,000 as a 2026 planning guide, depending on size, whether cabinetry is off-the-shelf or custom, and whether the layout changes. A compact internal laundry sits at the bottom; a full room with bench, overhead storage and a stone top sits at the top.
Is it cheaper with the bathroom?
Considerably. The trades are on site, the skip is ordered, the waterproofer is attending and the tiles arrive in one delivery. Adding a laundry to an existing bathroom program costs meaningfully less than doing it standalone later.
Can the laundry move?
On a slab, expensively. It needs water, waste with fall, power and ventilation — and relocating the waste means cutting concrete. In most Hills houses the laundry is already sensibly placed, so the return is far better from improving it in place.
What is the most common complaint?
No bench. Project-home laundries typically have a trough, a space for a washing machine, and nowhere at all to fold. Continuous bench space is the single change people notice most, and it is usually achievable without touching plumbing.
Does a laundry need waterproofing?
Laundries are wet areas and carry waterproofing requirements, though the extent differs from a bathroom and depends on the fixtures and floor construction. Ask for it in writing — what is being waterproofed and to what height.