Whole-home renovation in Vaucluse & Double Bay

Building on an eastern-suburbs harbour block

The two things that most reliably blow a budget here are access and geotechnics, and both are knowable before anyone commits.

Access

Many Vaucluse and Bellevue Hill blocks fall steeply from the street, with no side access and neighbours hard against both boundaries. Every cubic metre of excavated material and every length of steel has to travel a route somebody has planned. That route, whether crane, conveyor or through the house, sets the programme, the plant hire, and how long the street is disrupted. It is the first thing we look at and the last thing a plan-only quote considers.

What is under the site

Sandstone is a good foundation and an expensive excavation. Fill is the opposite. On a sloping block the two are often metres apart. A geotechnical investigation before pricing turns the largest single variable in the job into a known number, and we would rather have that conversation than carry it as a contingency nobody can size.

Coastal exposure is a specification, not a warning

Salt does not care what a finish cost. Within a few hundred metres of open water, external fixings, balustrade fittings, window hardware and exposed steel all need to be specified for the exposure category, not chosen from a catalogue. The failures we get called to look at are almost always the same: standard-grade stainless bleeding rust down a render wall, a balustrade fixing that has swollen and cracked its stone, or a terrace membrane that was never detailed for standing water.

The extra cost of getting it right is a rounding error against the cost of opening it up again.

Approvals through Woollahra Council

Woollahra has parts of Vaucluse, Double Bay and Bellevue Hill under conservation controls, and view-sharing between neighbours is a live planning consideration in a way it is not in most of Sydney. Both are far cheaper to design around than to argue about after lodgement. We do constructability reviews at the drawing stage with your architect, so the thing that gets approved is also the thing that can be built for the number discussed.

Living through it, or not

Some clients move out; some stay in part of the house. Both work, and they are genuinely different projects: staged, sequenced and priced differently. It is worth deciding early, because retrofitting a staged programme onto a job scoped as a vacant site is the sort of change that costs real money.