Money Saving Tips for the Inner City renovation Article
i.Dwell Pty Ltd

I’ve stated it before in my other articles but it is worth mentioning again.....”renovating for profit” is a extremely difficult unless you have the time and experience to undertake the design and building work.
Therefore if you are thinking of renovating you need to cautiously approach your renovation. Our first advice would be to make sure you find an architect who is budget conscious, also known in the industry as a developer’s architect. While they may not design you the house you see on the cover of “House” magazine, they are most likely to ensure you don’t spend an extra $100,000 gaining nothing more than enhancing your architect’s portfolio.
In our experience as budget conscious renovation advisors and designers, our tips to save money when doing inner city renovations would be the following:
• Work with what exists and resist knocking down walls and windows.
• As a follow on, minimise the demolition of what exists. Not only do you pay to demolish, you pay to rebuild. Architects love to demolish what exists as it makes their job easier as they don’t have to work with what exists.
• Be realistic with your budget, ie. most people think they can tear off the back of your house and rebuild a new kitchen, living, dining, and bathroom with 2 bedrooms upstairs for $200k. Do some research on costs of similar renovations before contacting a designer
• It is cheaper to expand on the ground floor than to add an additional storey
• Work within your roofline by converting your attic space instead of adding a whole new level
• Tell your architect to go easy on built in joinery – while this can look great the costs are extremely high for custom designed furniture, plus there is also the fact that fixed joinery cannot be moved and therefore remains and often dates badly.
• Consider a flat pack kitchen for kitchen renovations
• Do the painting yourself
• Select and buy the bath fixtures and fittings yourself
• Select and buy all bathroom tiles yourself
• Carpet is substantially cheaper than hardwood and should be considered for first floor additions where there are bedrooms
• Consider access before even beginning. If your house has difficult access then you need to be aware that builder’s and sub contractors all factor this in to their pricing and therefore could add 20% to your costs.
• Before you begin decide whether it is better to sell than to renovate. We’ve done this analysis for a number of clients and have found that 50% of the time it is better to sell than to renovate.

The attached image is an addition to a house in the Inner West where we are converting an existing 2 bed 1 bathroom house into a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house. It’s been designed to minimise the bulk and scale of the house as required by Council. We convinced the client to retain the existing attic bedroom and ground floor walls at the rear to save them the cost of demolition and rebuilding to achieve the same end result.
For more information on i.DWELL Pty Ltd check out our profile on HomeOne or at www.idwell.net.au

Visit i.Dwell Pty Ltd Website