Before committing to anything, the real question is whether this house is worth the money at all, or whether the same spend buys a better house three suburbs over.
You have probably already run a version of this in your head, late, on a real estate app. The house three suburbs over with the flat block and the north-facing back, for roughly what this one would cost to fix. Then you closed the app, because moving felt like giving up on the house you chose.
It is not giving up. It is one of two reasonable answers, and it deserves to be worked out rather than felt out. The difficulty is that almost everyone you would ask has a stake in which way it goes. The agent earns on the sale. The builder earns on the build. I earn on the renovation. Once you notice that, the only sensible order of operations is to do the arithmetic yourself first and then take it to someone.
So here is the arithmetic. It is not complicated. It is just that nobody publishes it, because for a good number of readers the answer is move.
I earn nothing if the answer is move. I have still told people to move, and I would again.
This is a financial modelling question with a design input, and it is genuinely answerable. What the site allows, what the character overlay permits, what the addition would cost per square metre, and what the finished property would be worth against comparable sales. Getting a defensible answer early is worth more than any design decision that follows it.
Permission to stop, or conviction to start. Either is a good outcome. The corrosive state is the third one — proceeding while quietly unsure, which shows up later as second-guessing every decision and resenting every invoice.
The decision gets made on feel, or by a real estate agent with an interest in the answer, or by a builder who has never met a project they'd advise against. Some people renovate a house that should have been sold. Others sell a house that only needed one wall moved.
A registered architect is one of the very few people in this conversation with no financial interest in your answer. The agent earns on a sale. The builder earns on a build. I lose nothing by telling you this house is not worth the money, or that the same spend buys better three suburbs over. That independence is the whole reason to get advice before you get drawings — you want the person assessing the question to be genuinely indifferent to which way it goes.
It depends almost entirely on whether you are allowed to demolish, which on a pre-1947 house in the inner suburbs is often the whole question rather than a detail. Many Brisbane character suburbs sit inside a demolition control precinct or a character overlay, and removing a pre-1947 house — or even the front half of it — needs council's permission and frequently does not get it. Where demolition is genuinely available, a new build gives you a level floor, current insulation and a single trade sequence, and it can price better per square metre than surgery on old timber. Check the overlays before you compare any numbers.
Add these up before you compare anything. Transfer duty on the purchase — Queensland's rates run on a sliding scale and there are concessions if you will live in it, so use the Queensland Revenue Office calculator rather than a rule of thumb. Agent commission on the sale, which is negotiable here and worth getting in writing from two agents. Marketing and styling. Conveyancing on both sides. Building and pest. Mortgage discharge and establishment fees. Removalists. On a typical inner-Brisbane sale and purchase the total is not small, and none of it buys you any building. That figure is the bid your renovation has to beat.
Less reliably than people hope, and the number that matters is not the citywide average — it is your street. Look up actual sold prices for renovated houses within a few hundred metres of you, on similar land, with a similar aspect, over the last twelve months. That is your ceiling. If your purchase price plus the renovation cost lands above the best sale in your street, you are spending money you will not see again. That can still be the right decision if you intend to stay twenty years. It should be a decision you make rather than one you discover.
Structurally, more often than people fear. Hardwood frames from that era are usually sound, the services are accessible because you can get underneath, and raising and building under is a move Brisbane builders understand well. What makes a house not worth it is usually the site rather than the building — a block that falls the wrong way, a bad flood level, an orientation that puts your only living space hard against the western boundary. Those are not fixable at any budget. The old timber is generally the cheap part of the problem.
Almost nobody in the transaction, and it is worth naming that out loud. The agent is paid on the sale, the builder on the build, and I am paid on the renovation. A quantity surveyor and a valuer are the two professionals with no stake in which way it goes, and against a decision this size their fees are small compared with being wrong. Failing that, do the arithmetic yourself and then ask each of us to argue against it. What people say when asked to argue against their own interest is more revealing than what they say when asked what they would do.
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.