Plumber in Corrimal

Corrimal is a strata suburb, and the Census says so plainly. Only 58.4 per cent of dwellings are separate houses, the lowest share in the northern Illawarra. Another 19.5 per cent are semi-detached and 20.9 per cent are flats or apartments, nearly a third are rented, and the average household is just 2.3 people. That completely changes what a plumbing job looks like. Instead of one owner and one set of pipes, you have common property, shared stacks, a body corporate that has to approve the work, and a tenant, an owner and a strata manager who all need to be told different things.

Half the work in a Corrimal unit block is working out whose problem it is. A leak showing in a downstairs bathroom is very often coming from the unit above or from a common-property stack, and the line between lot property and common property decides who pays. We do the diagnosis first with acoustic and thermal leak detection and a CCTV drain camera, then write it up clearly enough that the strata committee can act on it without a second opinion. Guessing costs owners far more than investigating properly.

Council has bought five houses out of one Corrimal flood pocket. Corrimal sits in the Towradgi Creek catchment, which also covers Tarrawanna, East Corrimal and Towradgi and includes North Corrimal Creek. Wollongong City Council names Lemrac Avenue, south of the Willow Grove intersection, as a problem location, and records five properties purchased through the voluntary purchase scheme around Pioneer Road and Willow Grove. The current document is the Towradgi Creek Flood Study, Floodplain Risk Management Study and Plan of June 2023, built on ARR2019 rainfall standards. Corrimal is also listed under the Collins Creek catchment in the SES Wollongong Local Flood Plan.

Corrimal is not on the beach, whatever the maps suggest. This one catches people out constantly. The South Coast railway line forms the western boundary of East Corrimal, which is a separate suburb, and it is East Corrimal that contains Corrimal Beach and the tourist park. Corrimal proper sits inland of the rail line. That matters practically: we do not push salt-corrosion maintenance schedules on Corrimal properties the way we would at Bulli or Thirroul, because the exposure genuinely is not the same. If your place is east of the line, that is a different conversation and we will have it.

A century of coke works closed in 2014, and the site is still being cleaned up. Thomas Bertram established the Corrimal Colliery in 1883, the station opened in 1887, and the colliery ran until 1985. The coke works immediately west of the station operated for over a hundred years before closing in 2014, and Council's planning approval process for the redevelopment mandated a revised remediation action plan, with Wollongong DCP 2009 Chapter D19 written specifically for the site. If you are working on or near that land, contamination is a live planning consideration and it affects excavation, spoil handling and stormwater discharge. Talk to us before you dig.

Corrimal is not in a mine subsidence district, despite the collieries. Subsidence Advisory NSW declares 29 districts across the state and none of them cover Wollongong LGA. The mining history here is genuine heritage; the statutory district is not something that applies to your property. We mention it because it comes up in nearly every conversation about older Corrimal houses.