Working out a ceiling you can genuinely plan on, and what it buys in Brisbane right now. It's the conversation people most often put off, and the one that saves the most.
If you've spent an evening searching the cost to renovate a Queenslander in Brisbane, you'll have found one page giving one range and another giving a very different one, and neither will have told you why they disagree. It isn't that one of them is wrong. They're pricing different houses and calling it the same job.
A raise is one number if the house is a straightforward timber Queenslander on level ground with a truck able to get down the side. It's another thing entirely if the house has been extended twice in brick, sits on a fall, and has no access wider than a wheelbarrow.
So what's useful here isn't a figure. It's knowing what drives the figure on your house. Each project is different, and I'll give you a realistic range for yours early.
Published ranges aren't estimates. They're the two ends of a very wide spread.
Construction cost is knowable, and the gap between what you expect and what things cost is the most common reason a project stalls. Establishing the real ceiling first means the design gets shaped to fit it rather than drawn twice.
You get to stop guessing. Money is the most loaded subject in the whole process, and you may arrive braced to be judged. You won't be. The renovation you want and the budget you have right now aren't always the same thing, and that's not a failure, it's reality.
The budget gets set from a renovation show, a neighbour's half-remembered figure, or hope. On a small, familiar job that usually holds. On an older timber house you're carrying the risk that the first real price arrives after the drawings are finished.
I bring the money conversation forward, and it runs both ways. At the site briefing I'll tell you the range I think a project like yours sits in, and the range my fee sits in, then ask how that lands with you. It's one of the most common conversations I have with clients, and far better had at your kitchen table than at the end of a drawing set.
The figure worth carrying is a rate per square metre of new or substantially reworked floor area, and I'll give you the current one for your kind of work when we speak. Two things catch people out. The rate applies to the parts you touch, not the whole house. And the fixed costs, from approvals to site setup, barely change between a small job and a large one.
The published spread is enormous, and that's real rather than sloppy. What moves it: whether the house is all timber or has masonry attached, how level the site is, truck and crane access, the state of the existing stumps, and how much of the house has to be reworked where the new floor meets it. A builder walking your site is worth more than any published range, and arranging that is part of what I do.
The predictable ones first: asbestos in sheeting and eaves linings, lead in old paint, rewiring, replumbing, restumping, termite repair found when a wall opens. Then the fact that nothing in an old house is square, so joinery and glazing get made rather than bought. Then the site ones: narrow access, tree protections, stormwater, a plumbing approval whenever a wet area moves. I allow for them from the start.
Whatever figure you find, treat it as this year's figure rather than a constant. Brisbane is a rising market and construction costs here are escalating, largely because of the volume of work committed ahead of 2032. So a price you get early in the year isn't the price you get late in it. If your budget has no room for escalation, build the smaller thing sooner.
Backwards. Start with what you can genuinely spend, including the figure you'd rather not say out loud. Take a contingency off it, more on an old timber house than a new one. Then set aside the costs that aren't construction: design, consultants and authority fees. What's left is the builder's number, and that's what the design gets shaped to fit.
If you would rather start small, the First Sketch Session is two hours at your place. You keep the sketches, and there is no obligation afterwards.
