Renovations
Renovations for homes worth keeping.
Whole-home renovations across Lennox Head, Ballina and the Northern Rivers, handled with respect for the structure and the people in it.
The work
Renovations cover everything from updating a tired home for a new chapter, to gutting and rebuilding the inside while keeping the shell, to staged renovations that happen across a few years as a family’s needs change.
Most of our renovation work is whole-home or substantial. If you’re after a single room (a bathroom, a kitchen, a laundry), those have their own service pages and a slightly different process.
Respecting the existing home
An older home is a record of decisions, additions and repairs over decades. Some of them are worth keeping. Some of them are the reason you’re renovating. Part of the job is knowing which is which.
We start by understanding what’s already there: the structure, the services, the orientation, the parts of the floor plan that work and the parts that don’t. The renovation that follows tries to keep what’s worth keeping and only changes what needs changing. That usually saves money. It also tends to produce a better home, because some of the best parts of an older house are hard to recreate from scratch.
Where new work is going in, we make decisions about materials and detail that work with the existing house rather than against it. The renovation should feel like one home by the end, not two stitched together.
Living through the build
Most renovations happen while the homeowner is still living in the house, at least for part of the time. That’s a real consideration, and we plan around it.
Practically: we sequence the build so disruption is contained to one part of the home at a time where possible. Dust and noise are managed actively, with the right setup at the start rather than apologies after the fact. We talk through which rooms will be unusable when, and for how long. If the kitchen or bathrooms are coming out, we work out where you’ll be cooking, washing and showering before the work begins.
Some renovations are easier (and faster, and cheaper) to do with the home empty. If that’s the case, we’ll say so up front and you can decide whether to relocate for a stretch or live through it.
How a renovation works
The same five stages as our other work apply: initial consultation, design and quote, approvals, construction, handover. But the design and quote stage is usually more complex for a renovation, because we’re working with an existing structure rather than a blank site.
We open up enough of the house at the survey stage to know what’s behind the walls. Where the services run, what condition the structure is in, what’s likely to come up once we start. The fewer surprises mid-build, the easier the project runs.
A look at our renovations work
Start with a conversation.
The first consultation is free. Bring us a block, a set of plans, or just an idea you’ve been thinking about.