DIY or professional? An honest look.

Before the cost comparison, the legal one, because it removes about half the debate. In Tasmania you can legally demolish, tile, paint and fit accessories in your own home. You cannot do the plumbing yourself, ever. You cannot do the electrical work yourself, ever, and that includes the exhaust fan, the heat lamp and the heated towel rail circuit, all of which sit inside the bathroom zones defined by AS/NZS 3000. And the waterproofing of a wet area is regulated building work under the Building Act 2016 that has to be done and certified properly, not self-certified by the person who laid it.

So a DIY bathroom on the North-West Coast is never actually DIY. It is you doing the labour around three trades you are still hiring, plus the coordination between them, which is the part nobody budgets for. Consumer, Building and Occupational Services (CBOS) administers the licensing side and is worth a call if you want the current position for your specific job.

What DIY really saves.

Now the number. Materials for a standard Devonport bathroom run roughly $8,000 to $14,000 once Bass Strait freight is in the tiles, stone and tapware. On top of that you are paying a licensed plumber, a licensed electrician and a waterproofer regardless. Set that against a $20,000 to $32,000 professional renovation from our pricing page and the realistic saving lands somewhere around $6,000 to $12,000.

That is a real saving and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it costs you is six to twelve weekends, a bathroom out of action for two to four months rather than three to four weeks, no trade pricing on materials, and every scrap of risk sitting on your side of the table. Some people look at that trade and take it, and if you are handy and patient it can work out. Just go in with the right number rather than the fantasy that you are saving $25,000.

The asbestos problem, and it is a real one here.

This is the section we would ask you to read even if you never call us. Bathrooms in homes built before roughly 1990 across Devonport, East Devonport and Latrobe very commonly have asbestos cement sheet as the wall lining behind the tiles, and asbestos backing under the old vinyl. Australia did not fully ban asbestos until the end of 2003, and our older housing stock is full of it.

Taking a hammer and bolster to tiles fixed to an asbestos sheet wall is one of the most dangerous things a homeowner can do to their own house and their own family, and it happens on this coast every year because the wall looks like ordinary sheet until it is airborne. Friable asbestos always requires a licensed Class A removalist. Non-friable removal above the regulated threshold must also be licensed. Check the current WorkSafe Tasmania guidance before you touch a pre-1990 bathroom wall, and if you are not certain what the lining is, get it sampled. A sample costs very little. The alternative does not have a price.

Why the membrane is the line we will not blur.

Waterproofing looks like painting. That is the trap. It is a continuous barrier to AS 3740 that has to be turned up the walls to the right heights, dressed correctly into the floor waste, bonded to a properly prepared substrate, detailed at every junction and corner with bond breakers where movement will happen, and cured fully before anything goes over it. Get any one of those details wrong and the room looks perfect for four years and then quietly rots the frame, as we set out on our bathroom lifespan page.

In Devonport that failure mode is worse than most places, because our rooms do not dry. Just under 1,000 millimetres of rain a year, 9am winter humidity above 80 per cent and July maximums around 12 to 13 degrees means a damp cavity stays damp from May to September. There is no drying season to save a marginal membrane here.

Insurance, and the Tasmanian gap.

Home insurance policies exclude damage caused by faulty workmanship and by gradual water escape. A DIY membrane that fails in year four is both at once, so you can expect a decline. And Tasmania is the only state without mandatory home warranty insurance sitting behind residential building work, which cuts both ways: it is why choosing a licensed operator matters here more than on the mainland, and it is why a DIY failure has absolutely nobody standing behind it. Our water damage claims page goes through what is and is not covered.

A worked example.

A 1978 brick veneer in Quoiba. The owner did his own strip-out and tiling, brought in a licensed plumber for the rough-in and fit-off, and rolled the membrane himself over a weekend. Total spend, about $11,200 in materials and trades. Genuinely well laid tiles, too, he was good with his hands.

Five years later the floor at the shower door went spongy. The membrane had not been dressed into the floor waste properly, which is a ten-minute detail and the single most common DIY miss we see. Insurance declined it as gradual escape and faulty workmanship. We stripped the room, replaced a section of particleboard floor and two bottom plates, re-membraned to AS 3740 with the inspection, and re-tiled: $26,900 in 2026. His total was about $38,100 for a bathroom that would have cost $24,000 done once. The saving was real for five years. It just was not permanent.

What we would genuinely tell you to DIY.

• Painting. The ceiling and any non-tiled wall. Straightforward, no hidden consequence, real money off the quote.
• Accessories after handover. Towel rails, mirrors, shelving, hooks. Easy wins.
• Your own selections and sourcing. Tiles, tapware, vanity. You will often enjoy this part more than we do, and it is where your room gets its personality.
• Clearing and preparing the space. Moving furniture, emptying cupboards, sorting access and parking. Sounds trivial, genuinely shortens the job.
• Project decisions, made early. The cheapest thing you can possibly do is finalise selections before demolition so nothing stops mid-job waiting on a ferry.

What is not worth doing yourself is anything that ends up behind a tile. Once it is covered, the cost of being wrong is the entire room. That is the whole rule, and it is the only one that matters. If you want a hand deciding where your line sits, we will come out for a free measure and tell you straight, including if the answer is that you should do it yourself. See our full bathroom renovations page for what a done-once job includes.