A proper measured survey of the existing house, drawn up accurately. Everything that follows is drawn on top of it.
You have been quoted a few thousand dollars to draw your existing house and it feels like being charged for something that already exists. It is the most resented line in a fee proposal and I understand why. Nothing new appears at the end of it. You get a drawing of the house you already live in.
Here is what is actually being bought. Old houses lie. A 1954 approval drawing records what somebody intended to build, not what got built. Walls run out of square by an amount you would never notice standing in the room and cannot ignore when joinery is being made. Floors fall towards the back. Stumps have been replaced at slightly different heights. Somewhere along the way a previous owner enclosed the underneath without telling anyone.
Each of those is either found now, on paper, or later on site — where it stops being a measurement and becomes a variation.
This is the least interesting thing I will ever draw for you, and the drawing your budget most depends on.
Existing houses are never what the old plans say they are. Walls are out of square, floors fall, additions were made without approval and nothing is where the 1954 drawing puts it. An accurate base is the difference between a design that builds and one that generates variations from the first week.
Seeing your own house drawn properly for the first time. It is a surprisingly emotional document — the plan makes visible what you've only ever experienced, and people often understand their own problem while looking at it.
Design is done over a real estate floor plan or a hand sketch. The error is discovered on site, where the joinery doesn't fit and the roof line doesn't meet. Every one of those is a variation, and variations are the most expensive kind of change there is.
I will be direct: this is a boring stage, and it is the one that protects your budget. Every measurement I take here is something your builder does not have to guess at, and builders price what they have to guess at as risk. You pay that margin. Pre-Design runs about four weeks and roughly a tenth of the fee, and it buys you a drawing set that matches the house you actually own rather than the one on the 1954 plan.
Because the plans you hold are almost certainly a record of intent rather than of what is there. Council approval drawings show what was proposed. Real estate floor plans are drawn quickly and are not dimensionally reliable. Neither accounts for the additions, enclosures and repairs made in the decades since. A design drawn on an inaccurate base looks fine on paper and fails at the point where new work meets old, which is exactly where the money is and where the builder writes the variation.
There is no standard rate, and the range is wide because the work is. A single-level post-war brick house on a flat block is quick. A two-storey Queenslander with a raised subfloor, several additions and a complicated roof takes a day or more on site and considerably longer to draw up properly. I have seen quotes in the several thousands for that second case and they are not necessarily unreasonable. Ask for it as a fixed fee, ask how many days on site it assumes, and ask what is excluded.
Different people doing different jobs, and most projects need both. A measured survey is the building — walls, levels, openings, roof — drawn by the architect. A contour and detail survey is the land, done by a registered surveyor: boundaries, ground levels, easements, services, trees and the levels of neighbouring structures. On a sloping Brisbane block that survey matters more than people expect, because building height under the City Plan is measured from ground level and the surveyor is the person who establishes where that is.
You can help, and it is worth doing. Old drawings, a survey plan, past approvals, photographs taken during a previous renovation with the walls open — all of it saves time and some of it saves money. What you cannot usefully do is replace the measure-up. The tolerances that matter are at the joins, the levels and the diagonals, and a small error there does not stay small. If your house is genuinely simple and the quote reads as though it is not, push back and ask what is driving the number.
It happens often in Brisbane — enclosed under-house rooms, carports, decks, a bathroom that appeared without a plumbing approval. Finding it now is better than not finding it, because it changes what you can do next and it will surface at sale in any case. Depending on what it is, it can sometimes be regularised through a building certifier, sometimes it needs an application to council, and occasionally the honest answer is that it has to come out. A certifier is the right person to ask early.
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.