There are many reasons why you might decide to renovate your character home. With clever design, even on small inner-city blocks, a sense of space and flow that enhances how you use and enjoy your home can be created. If you renovate, you can create your perfect home, without compromise. If you chose to sell up and buy elsewhere, it is very rare to stumble across your perfect home (that ticks every single box). Finally, it sounds obvious but what a renovation cannot do is increase the size of your block! If more land is what you are after, a renovation is not for you.

At Wooloowin Building Co. we don’t believe in creating BIG houses just for the sake of it. We believe in well-designed homes. We can work with the footprint of your current home to create a better layout and sense of space or extend as required. Sometimes a “lift and build” is the way to go and sometimes it isn’t. A “lift and build” is not for every character home – some homes lose proportion when hoisted into the air. When working with smaller character homes, it may be more appropriate to retain the original height and proportion of the home at the front and, for example, construct a two-storey extension off the back. For a complete “lift and build” in Brisbane, you need to allocate a minimum of $500k. That being said, these types of projects can be staged, if there are budget constraints.

An understanding of which aspects of the existing house work or don’t work is so important when embarking on any renovation project. A few questions you should ask yourself when considering a renovation of your character home are:

• What do I love about this house? Is it a particular view, the street, the way the sunlight shines through the kitchen window in the morning, a particular original feature, the garden etc.
• What has been added that should be removed?
• What was original and how can we highlight it?
• What significant trees, gardens and views can we embrace in the design?