The house has stopped fitting. A growing family, no place to work at home, a kitchen that is too small. There's no project yet, only the sense that something has to change.
Most people ring me saying the house is too small. Sometimes it is. More often there is floor area sitting unused because it is in the wrong place, or the wrong shape, or you have to walk through a bedroom to reach it. A Queenslander built in 1925 was organised around a central hall with rooms off it and the cooking and washing pushed to the back, a plan that made sense when the back of the house was where the work happened, and makes very little sense now that it is where everyone wants to be.
Before you price an extension, it is worth knowing whether you are buying floor area or a better arrangement of what you already own. Those two things cost very different amounts.
Your house probably isn't too small. It's the wrong layout — and the wrong layout is easier to fix.
Naming the problem precisely is what stops you solving the wrong one. Almost everyone arrives describing a solution,: 'we need an extension'. Often what they actually have is a symptom: 'the house is dark by four o'clock'. Working backwards from the symptom regularly produces a smaller and cheaper intervention than the one first imagined.
Relief at being taken seriously. The feeling has been vague and faintly embarrassing to say out loud. Having it treated as a legitimate design question rather than an indulgence is the moment the project stops being a private thought and becomes something you can start to visualise.
You go straight to a builder with the thing you first pictured. The underlying problem is never diagnosed, so it survives the renovation intact. Money is spent on an extension that doesn't fix the reason you wanted one, and the disappointment arrives eighteen months later when it's unfixable.
The first conversation is diagnostic, not a sales call. Most people arrive with a feeling rather than a brief, the house is dark by four, the kitchen is something you walk around rather than into, and turning that into something buildable is a professional skill in its own right. I would rather spend that first hour working out what the actual problem is than agreeing to draw the thing you first pictured. Sometimes the answer is smaller and cheaper than you feared.
Usually yes, and the rear is where Brisbane's character rules are most accommodating. The traditional building character overlay is mostly concerned with the street-facing form of a pre-1947 house — the roof, the front, what a person sees from the footpath. Additions behind the original form, set down or set back, are the common approach and the one council is most familiar with. What decides it on your block is the overlay set, the boundary setbacks, site cover, and how much of the original house you are proposing to remove.
On a Queenslander, underneath is usually cheaper and less contested. The house is already up on stumps and the character rules are more accommodating below than above. The catch is height. A habitable room needs 2.4 metres of ceiling under the National Construction Code, and once you allow for the floor above and a beam and a slab below, most original underfloor spaces do not have it. That is why so many Brisbane projects become a house raise. Adding on top is a larger structural and planning proposition on a pre-1947 house, and it changes what the street sees.
Do this before you spend anything. For two weeks, note where everyone actually is at 7am, 4pm and 7pm. Most families find they are using three rooms out of seven. If the unused rooms are unused because they are too far from the kitchen, too dark, or you have to pass through somewhere private to reach them, that is a layout problem — and layout is fixed by moving walls and openings rather than by adding square metres. If everyone genuinely is spread through every room and there is still nowhere to go, it is an area problem.
The honest answer is that it is rarely one wall. A traditional Queenslander sits a metre or more above the ground with the kitchen at the back and a run of small rooms in between, so opening it to the yard means resolving three things at once — the level change down to the ground, the room sequence between kitchen and garden, and where sun and rain land once the old back verandah's shade is gone. Done well it is the change that alters daily life most. Done as one set of glass doors onto a deck two metres above the lawn, it does not get used.
No. Most of the diagnosis is observation, and you are the one who lives there. Walk the house at different times of day and note where the light stops, where you queue, and which doors are never opened. Write the problems as symptoms rather than solutions — the house is dark by four, rather than we need a skylight. If you get to the end of that list and the answer is obvious, act on it. If the list contradicts itself, that is when a second set of eyes earns its money, and it is a much cheaper conversation than a redesigned extension.
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.