Tired of Chasing Five Different Tradies for One Home?
If you own a unit in Brisbane inner city, you know the drill. You want to get a few things done around the place — maybe some custom storage, a fresh coat of paint, the balcony finally sorted — and suddenly you're coordinating a small army. A carpenter for the cabinetry. A painter for the walls. A different company for the flooring. Someone else entirely for the outdoor stuff.
Each of them has a three-week lead time. None of them show up when they say they will. And somehow, after all of that, things still don't quite come together the way you imagined.
That's the problem Inner City Maintenance was built to solve.
"We built Inner City Maintenance because inner-city living has its own set of challenges — and most trades businesses aren't really set up for it. We are."
One Team. Every Space.
We're a Brisbane-based home transformation service built specifically for units, apartments, and townhouses. We work across the full scope of what it takes to make a city home actually function and feel great — indoors and out.
That means when you call us, you're not starting a project management exercise. You're making one call, to one team, who can handle the whole thing.
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Custom Storage & Cabinetry
Designed for your specific space — not a generic box that almost fits. Floor-to-ceiling, under-stair, built-in, bespoke.
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Flooring & Tiling
From full-room replacements to targeted upgrades. Timber, tile, hybrid — whatever works best for your space and lifestyle.
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Patching, Painting & Mounting
Walls that look like they were always meant to look that way. Repairs done properly, not just covered up.
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Fixtures & Flat Pack
Modern fixture installation and professional flat pack assembly — because life's too short to spend a Sunday with an allen key.
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Balcony & Courtyard Design
Custom outdoor spaces designed for inner-city entertaining. We turn bare concrete slabs into rooms you actually use.
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Carpet Cleaning
Professional clean that brings carpet back to life — and keeps it there. One of the highest-impact, lowest-cost refreshes you can do.
We Get Inner-City Living
Not every home improvement business is set up for units. A lot of them are built around houses — bigger spaces, simpler strata situations, more room to work. Inner-city apartments come with their own constraints. Noise restrictions. Lift access. Strata approval requirements. Limited parking for a work vehicle. Neighbours on three sides.
We work in these environments every day. We know how to get a job done cleanly and efficiently in a space where you can't just leave the front door open and make a mess of the hallway. We treat your home — and your building — with respect.
Sound familiar?
Storage that's never quite enough no matter how much you declutter
A balcony that's been "nearly sorted" for two years
Walls with old holes and mismatched paint from previous repairs
Flat pack furniture still in the box from when you moved in
Flooring you've learned to ignore but guests always notice
A pet and a small balcony and no good solution for either
The Pet Toilet Thing
While we're here — if you have a dog and a balcony and you've been living with a subscription-based pet toilet solution that costs you money every month and still somehow manages to smell, we have something worth knowing about.
We design and install odourless pet toilet systems for apartment balconies. One-off cost. No ongoing subscription. Designed specifically for your balcony layout and your dog's needs. It's one of those things that sounds niche right up until you need it, at which point it becomes the most important thing we do.
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Apartment dog owners: you don't have to keep paying monthly for a solution that doesn't really work. Our balcony pet toilet systems are custom-designed, properly installed, and genuinely odourless. One call sorts it for good.
Living Plant Walls — Because Your Balcony Deserves Better
One of our most requested installs right now is living plant walls — and it's easy to see why. In a unit where outdoor space is limited, a vertical garden does something that no amount of pot plants quite achieves. It brings a genuine sense of nature into a space that's otherwise surrounded by concrete and glass.
We design and install them to work with your specific wall type, your light exposure, and honestly, how much maintenance you actually want to do. This isn't a "here are some pots on a frame" situation — it's a proper installation that becomes a feature of your home.
Curious what we could do with your space? We're happy to come and take a look — no obligation, just an honest conversation about what's possible.
How to Actually Optimise Your Unit — Not Just Tidy It Up
Most advice about small-space living is surface-level stuff — declutter, use mirrors, hang some shelves. If you own your unit and you're ready to take it seriously, here's what actually moves the needle.
There's a particular frustration that comes with owning a unit you love — the location, the lifestyle, the building — but feeling like you're constantly working around the space rather than living comfortably in it. Bags stacked in the hallway. A balcony that's basically storage. A kitchen where half the cupboards are impossible to reach.
The thing is, most units aren't badly designed — they're just underutilised. The bones are usually there. What's missing is someone actually thinking about how you live in the space and making it work for that.
We spend a lot of time in people's homes doing exactly that. Here's what we've learned.
"Most units aren't badly designed. They're just underutilised. The bones are usually there — what's missing is someone making them work for how you actually live."
Start With the Hidden Square Metres
Before you think about furniture or finishes, look at the spaces you're currently writing off. The awkward alcove near the front door. The dead wall beside the bathroom. The gap between the fridge and the wall. The balcony you walk past without really seeing.
These are your biggest wins, and in almost every unit we work in, there are two or three of them. A well-designed storage solution built into an alcove can reclaim enough space to change how an entire room feels. Custom cabinetry fitted to an odd wall gives you storage that no flat-pack solution ever could — because it's designed for that specific space, not for a hypothetical average room.
Floor-to-ceiling storage
Most off-the-shelf units stop at 180cm. The space above is wasted. Custom cabinetry that runs to the ceiling can double your storage capacity in the same footprint.
Built-in seating with storage
Hallway benches, window seats, and built-in ottomans are some of the highest-return investments in a small space. Functional and beautiful.
Under-stair or under-bed systems
Drawer systems and pull-outs in otherwise dead space are consistently the thing people wish they'd done sooner.
Custom kitchen inserts
Bin drawers, pull-out pantries, and divider systems can transform a functional kitchen into one that actually makes sense for how you cook.
Your Walls Are Doing Less Work Than They Should
In a unit, vertical space is everything. Yet most people have large stretches of bare wall that aren't contributing anything to the way the space works or feels.
There are a few directions you can take this. Storage is the obvious one — floating shelves, wall-mounted cabinetry, hooks and hanging systems that get things off the floor without eating into your floor plan. But walls also do a lot for the feel of a space in ways people underestimate.
A well-executed feature wall changes a room. Whether that's a living green plant wall (which also improves air quality, if you want the added bonus), a textured panel, a bold paint choice, or a gallery-style mount arrangement — it anchors the space and makes a room feel designed rather than assembled.
We also do a lot of wall patching and preparation work, and it's worth saying plainly: walls that have old holes, rough patches, or mismatched paint from previous repairs are quietly making a space feel tired and cheap, even when everything else is nice. It's one of the highest-impact, lowest-glamour upgrades you can make.
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Living plant walls are one of our most requested installs right now — and not just for the aesthetic. In a unit where outdoor space is limited, a vertical garden brings nature inside in a way that genuinely changes how a room feels. We design and install them to work with your wall type, your light conditions, and your lifestyle.
The Balcony Problem (and Opportunity)
If we had to name the single most underutilised space in inner-city units, it would be the balcony. Without fail, nearly every balcony we see when we first visit a property is either empty, used as storage overflow, or has a token pot plant and a chair that gets used twice a year.
This is genuinely sad, because a well-designed balcony is one of the best things about unit living. It's your outdoor space. In a city, that matters.
What transforms a balcony isn't necessarily expensive — it's intentional. A custom design that thinks about how many people you want to seat, what privacy you need, whether you want greenery, how the sun hits at different times of day, and what kind of entertaining you actually do. The difference between a bare concrete slab with a folding table and a properly designed outdoor room is dramatic, and it adds genuine value to how you live in the property.
What a Balcony Transformation Can Include
Custom deck or flooring solution appropriate for the surface and strata rules
Built-in bench seating or planter boxes that maximise the footprint
Privacy screening or vertical garden panels
Weatherproof storage solutions for outdoor gear
Lighting design for evening use
Odourless, low-maintenance pet toilet design for dog owners — a one-off install, no ongoing subscription
Flooring Ties Everything Together
New flooring is one of those upgrades that people put off because it sounds disruptive and expensive. And it can be — if you're replacing an entire apartment. But in most units, a targeted flooring update in one or two rooms makes a significant difference to how cohesive and intentional the whole space feels.
Consistent flooring throughout an open-plan living area makes it read as larger. A quality tiled bathroom floor changes the feel of the whole room. Replacing carpet in a bedroom with timber-look planks is a fairly straightforward project that has an outsized impact on how the space feels to live in day-to-day.
On the carpet front — if you're keeping carpet, having it professionally cleaned is one of the cheapest and most impactful refreshes you can do. New carpet doesn't look or smell new for long without maintenance. Clean carpet does.
The Fixtures Nobody Notices Until They're Replaced
There's a category of upgrade that doesn't photograph well and doesn't come up in conversations about interior design, but quietly makes a huge difference to how a space functions and feels. We're talking about fixtures.
Door handles. Tapware. Light switches and power points. Towel rails. Cabinet hardware. These things age, go out of style, and — particularly in units that haven't been updated in a while — can make an otherwise nice space feel dated without anyone being able to quite put their finger on why.
Updating fixtures is not a glamorous project. It's also not expensive compared to what it returns. It's the kind of thing you do as part of a broader refresh and immediately wonder why you waited.
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One thing we always recommend: before you start buying furniture or decorating, spend a day walking your unit with fresh eyes and a notebook. Write down every thing that bothers you, every space that's not working, every repair you've been ignoring. That list is your brief. Start there, not with Instagram.
The Flat Pack Reality
Flat pack furniture exists on a spectrum between "actually fine" and "bought it because it was cheap and now it's ruining the room." There's nothing wrong with flat pack — some of it is genuinely good — but it works best when it's the right piece for the space, properly assembled, and not doing a job it wasn't designed for.
Poorly assembled flat pack is a safety issue (particularly anything structural or load-bearing) and it shows. If you've got a unit full of furniture that was assembled in a rush when you moved in and has been wobbling ever since — or if you've just bought something and don't want to spend your weekend on it — getting it done properly is worth it.
Where to Start
The honest answer is: with whatever is bothering you most. That's usually the thing making the space feel most compromised, and fixing it tends to unlock enthusiasm for everything else.
If it's storage, let's talk about what a custom solution would look like in your specific space. If it's the balcony you've been ignoring, we can come and look at what's possible. If it's a bit of everything — some patching and painting, a fixture update, a storage solution — that's actually the most common scenario, and it's exactly the kind of project we're set up for.
You own this place. It should feel like it.
Inner City Maintenance
Ready to make your space actually work?
We come to you, take a proper look, and tell you honestly what would make the biggest difference.
Pet Toilets that don’t smell!
Pet toilet
If you live in a limited space, you’re likely familiar with your furry friend needing to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, when the sun hits the smell can be rather unpleasant!
There are a range of options on the market that include plastic toilets where insects end breeding. Expensive monthly grass subscriptions. Pee pads.
We’ve created an environmentally friendly solution that ensures your fur baby can use the bathroom and your space wont smell!
We custom make and design out pet toilets to optimise your space and meet the needs of your pet! No more odours, cat litter, bugs, mess or inconvenience.
If you want a designer solution, please call us on 0437 446 669 or email info@innercitymaintenanceco.com.au.