The house has stopped fitting — a growing family, nowhere to work, a kitchen you edge around rather than cook in. There's no project yet, just a sense that something could be better.
Our house is too small for our family is the sentence I hear most often, and sometimes it's exactly right. More often there's floor area sitting unused — in the wrong place, the wrong shape, or reached by walking through a bedroom. A Queenslander was organised around a central hall with the cooking and washing pushed to the back, which made sense when that was where the work happened and much less sense now.
So before you price an extension, it's worth knowing whether you're buying floor area or a better arrangement of what you already own. Those are two different projects.
Working out which one you're in is what this stage is for. You tell me how the house is actually used, and I work back from the symptom to the cause. Often the answer is smaller than you expected.
Your house probably isn't too small. It's the wrong shape — and the wrong shape is the easier thing to fix.
Naming the problem precisely is what stops you solving the wrong one. You'll arrive describing a solution — we need an extension — when what you have is a symptom: the house is dark by four. Working back from the symptom usually produces a smaller, cheaper change.
You get to say the vague thing out loud and have it taken seriously. Treated as a real design question rather than an indulgence, it stops being a private thought and becomes something you can picture.
You go to a builder with the thing you first pictured, and when the fix is obvious that works well. Where it's less obvious, the underlying problem stays undiagnosed and is still there once the new room is finished.
The first conversation is diagnostic, not a sales call. You'll arrive with a feeling rather than a brief — the kitchen is something you walk around rather than into — and turning that into something buildable is a skill in its own right. I'd rather spend that first hour finding the actual problem than agreeing to draw the thing you first pictured.
Usually yes. The rear is where Brisbane's character rules are most accommodating: the traditional building character overlay is mostly concerned with what the street sees, so additions behind the original house are the approach council knows well. What settles it on your block is the overlay set, the setbacks and site cover, and I read those first.
Underneath is usually cheaper and less contested — the house is already on stumps and the rules are gentler below than above. The catch is height: a habitable room needs a minimum ceiling under the National Construction Code, and many original underfloor spaces don't have it. That's why so many Brisbane projects become a house raise.
Notice where everyone actually is at breakfast, at four, and after dinner. You may find you're using three rooms out of seven. If the empty ones are empty because they're too far from the kitchen, too dark, or reached through somewhere private, that's a layout problem, fixed by moving walls rather than adding square metres.
Rarely with one wall, honestly. A Queenslander sits well above the ground with the kitchen at the back, so opening it to the yard means resolving three things together: the level change to the garden, the run of rooms between kitchen and lawn, and where sun and rain land once the old verandah's shade has gone.
Not necessarily. You're the one who lives there, and much of the diagnosis is simply noticing. Write the problems as symptoms rather than solutions: the house is dark by four, rather than we need a skylight. If the list points somewhere obvious, act on it. If it contradicts itself, that's when a second set of eyes earns its keep.
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.
