First post ever - My Spring Hill Renovation Project

On Saturday, our friend (and soon to be architect) dropped by to talk with us about what we want and need out of our prospective renovation.

Equipped with what is no doubt the smallest budget since the early 90's (at least for a sizey renovation project in inner-city Brisbane), a house that is now literally falling down around us, and despite being located in an area that has more codes and restrictions than pretty well any other suburb in a twenty kilometer radius, we finally took our first step.

Well, you could call it our first step if you were to disregard the last twelve months where we almost gave up all hope of ever getting the ball rolling.

Why?

Well, everything costs money. And when it comes to planning and building, you can almost always add another zero to any figure you as a layperson might imagine up when estimating potential costs.

The first financial blow came at the end of 2009, when we engaged a Steve Cooper & Associates (http://www.stevecooper.com.au) to undertake an Identification Survey and Contour & Detail Survey (AHD). Let me just preface this by saying I could not fault them, and if you need to get some surveying work done, I would definitely recommend them, but at just under $5000…I half expected them to use gold survey pegs! 

The second blow came when we got the quote from a Spring Hill based architect we’d had our eye on for some time, Brian Steendyk (http://www.steendyk.com) – a very nice, extremely helpful, and full of amazing ideas guy, who creates fantastic designs and houses and is familiar with local code requirements. (Check out the Steendyk designed Spring Hill Enviro-Cottage at http://www.envirocottage.com.au). Unfortunately, the quote arrived only days after a close colleague of mine came terribly unstuck during his own major home building project and almost lost everything…including his marriage. 

For us to have accepted the quote, we would have immediately lost over ten percent of our maximum building budget – taking our total budget down to around $70,000. This amount was without any buffer built in. If I were to include the recommended 30% buffer (and given the strife my friend was in, a buffer was essential) our budget was now down to $49,000. 

So we gave up. At least for a little while anyway. 

But then a series of tremendous south-east Queensland storms hit town in September and October, and we lost what little remaining integrity there had been in our back stairs, and were forced to get a builder out to give us a quote to replace the 16 tread death trap. 

There is nothing like the threat of throwing money away to motivate a person to take some action. So armed with the prospect of having to spend money on stairs that would only be there until we finally got the real reno’s done, and driven also by a good deal of spousal pestering, I finally got our friend to come around and talk about what we needed to do, what we wanted to do, what we could afford to do, and who could possibly do it. 

For my next post, I will try and include a timeline, with some information/rationale against each minor or major milestone. Although we haven’t actually had any major milestones yet!