“It’s just a bathroom”… So why all the drawings?

There’s a quiet shift that has happened in the building consent realm over the last decade, and most homeowners don’t really see it until they start planning a small renovation.

In our experience clients often imagine the consent process for a minor bathroom or kitchen renovation as something fairly simple. The designer prepares a few drawings, submits them to council, and approval follows. Not so long ago that was close to the truth, particularly for small projects like bathrooms, alterations, or internal reconfigurations.

What has changed is a dramatic shift from presenting documentation with implied compliance to a new documented compliance requirement.

In the past, implied compliance meant a lot of building work relied on the experience of a designer or builder knew the rules and applied them. We produced drawings showing how the building would be constructed. Consent officers reviewing those drawings also understood typical construction methods, and there was a degree of professional interpretation involved.

Today the process is very much documented compliance. In simple terms, it’s not enough to suggest that the building work will comply with the Building Code, our drawings need to clearly demonstrate how that compliance is achieved.

Even our relatively small projects involve multiple parts of the Building Code.

For a typical bathroom remodel we typically cover the following building code clauses:

• Drainage to satisfy G13,

• Plumbing to G12,

• Ventilation to G4,

• Internal moisture protection to E3,

• External moisture if there is a window involved to E2,

• and Smoke alarms to the revised Clause C,

Sometimes structural considerations under B1 are required if walls are affected.

None of this means the building itself is particularly complicated. A bathroom renovation or laundry addition might still be very straightforward to construct. What has changed is the expectation that the documentation shows each compliance pathway clearly. In the last 5 years the time taken to prepare this information has increased by over 400%.

That means drawings today often include specific waterproofing details, ventilation notes, drainage layouts, product specifications, and references to the specific Building Code clauses being used and how compliance is achieved.

A big part of our role is therefore translating a straightforward piece of building work into documentation that allows a consent officer to quickly verify compliance.

You could think of it as moving from “this will comply” to “here is the evidence that it complies.”

For homeowners, this shift helps explain why the design and consent phase of even small projects can involve more work than expected and escalate the council costs involved. The physical construction may be modest, but the documentation still needs to satisfy the same regulatory framework that governs larger buildings.

Good documentation doesn’t always get much attention, but it plays an important role in keeping projects moving smoothly. Clear drawings help avoid requests for further information, reduce delays, and give builders confidence that the work has been properly thought through before construction begins.

It’s one of the less visible parts of architecture, but increasingly, it’s where a lot of the work happens.