Thread: Renovation advice please...

Good evening everyone


Excellent forum you guys have here. I would like to get some opinions on some renovations we plan on starting in the next year or so. We are still in early planning stages.


I have attached a PDF of current house plans and what we propose on doing. I hope these plans are easily understood. They were drawn up by me, I am a civil draftsman by trade, and I wouldn't consider myself as an expert when is comes to residential housing designs.


A little history on the property. Located north of brisbane, 7km from CBD. House was purchased in June 2010. 607m2 lot. Post war home, i think 1960s. Dodgey extension where the current laundry and toilet is located. Front is north facing.


Ideas are as follow
- Demolish existing laundry and toilet.
- Raise current house and shift to rear of lot. (Raise to legal height to provide min 2.7m ceiling heights for ground floor.)
- Refurbish current house to provide 3 reasonably sizers bedroom and 2 bathrooms.
- New extension added to front of house for northerly light and breezes.
- New ground floor plan + double garage.


This will be a long term investment. We may worry about over capitalising, but this will be a home where we intend to live for at least the next 5 to 10 years and bring our kids up. We enjoy entertaining, therefore we have provided a large open plan living upstairs.


We are hoping (fingers crossed) that the complete build will be around the 250k-300k mark. If all else fails, we would like to be able to stage it so that we can refurbish upstairs and leave downstairs to a later date.


I would like to do the planning applications myself, but would like to have a guide from some of the experts here on the best process? what plans are required? weather current plans are sufficient? etc...


Thanks in advance.

Hi Gary, welcome.

It seems to me that every internal wall is being changed. Is that right? (EDIT: I think now that the Existing becomes the First Floor, so less is changing, but a lot is changing...) If so, and given you plan to move the whole house on the block, I'd be thinking to demolish and do a total rebuild, and reusing materials from the existing house where possible. Regarding plans, down here in addition to your plan view, we need dimensions on 'everything', roof line on the plan view, elevations of front and sides for things like window placement, openings and sizes etc, and site plans regarding setback/position on land and relative to neighbouring dwellings along with shadowing at various times of the day. That's for starters anyway... You are obviously a skilled draftsman, but knowing what is required for residential is the key. On such a budget a couple of grand spent on detailed drawings will save frustration for you and the builders later

Also, what drawing program did you use to maintain the layers when publishing to PDF? Are there many programs that can do that?

@r3nov8or

Thanks for the advice...I am currently in consideration about knockdown rebuild vs renovating. If all else fails, we may just sell up and move elsewhere where there is a house that better suits our needs, but that will be our last resort.

As for the PDF layers, I use AutoCad 2010 and there is a selection to print to PDF and maintaining all the layers that were created in the dwg file. This is sometimes helpful in PDF especially if you'd like to hide certain layers.