Knock down and rebuild advice

If structural alterations are made get a copy of the engineer’s inspection and make sure the builder has them certified and hold back final payment until ACTPLA issues the approval.

If you don’t do this you risk paying out tens of thousands of dollars for retrospective certification down the track when you sell your property.

And it’s no use going to Master Builders Association if you get caught. They protect the builder, not the customer.

I would like to suggest the name of our builder for this forum as we have recently completed a Knock down rebuild and are overjoyed with the result.

NJR Homes over delivered during a few Covid compromised years. We have our dream home thanks to Nick and his personal investment in our dream. With escalating building costs due to covid, Nick and the team didn’t try to cash in and was true to his word when things got more costly with his transparency of all invoices and receipts.

Nick is a builder who takes you through all the nuances of contacts, keeps you informed, and has uncompromising standards for all of his trades.

The one thing I would recommend for future clients is do your research on engineers, ours added time and delay. We got there but was very stressful having to follow them up. I would have preferred to have Nick’s advice first. Every other trade we used, as recommend by Nick, was top notch and took our needs seriously.

The final walkthrough showed Nick’s high standards. Would absolutely recommend.

There’s also the issue of working out how much to pay for the ‘fixer-upper’ in the first place. I don’t think there’s much point in buying a house that is already modern and fairly current, then spending more money to renovate it to your tastes. Financially speaking, you’re better off buying something structurally sound but old and ugly, and spending similar dollars on renovation but to achieve a much greater uplift in liveability and capital value.

No building experience directly with either, but we have spoken to them both extensively. If possible, ask to see some of their clients homes. Look for any cracks in the plaster work, sagging etc.
I’d also ask how many homes they are building each year and how many they have on the go at the moment and how many builders/foremen they have. If they have one builder and they are responsible for building 20 homes a year, stay away. If its about 10 to 11 at one time, it’s manageable. The ideal number is about 5 to 6, but for project builders that’s not enough.

watto23 said :

Maya123 said :

watto23 said :

Rollersk8r said :

vintage123 said :

Hi there. Yes I have had direct experience with both Hotondo and C.J Gardner. Unfortunately all of my plans did not eventuate as it was going to be too expensive. The quotes were about twice the price of our budget. There is nothing really complicated about knock down rebuilding versus just building, apart from one extra task of demolition. Be careful not to over capitalise. Building in canberra is frightfully expensive, more often than not it is hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper just to sell your current house and purchase a bigger and newer version of an existing house in your suburb. The best thing about buying existing is that you can actually see what you are buying and there are minimal surprises and minimal cost shocks.

Sorry to hijack the OP but you’ve touched on some questions we’re currently considering. We have probably overspent in renovating kitchen, laundry and bathroom in our poky 3 bedroom house – and now want to extend. The bank have offered to loan us a stupidly large amount of money.

I know at the end of day you just have to work things out for yourself – but how do you decide if you’re overcaptialisihng? Who can advise on this?

A simple rule for over capitalising is work out how much your home cost, how much you’ve spent on renovations and look at what a similar property is selling for in the suburb. No point buying a place for $400k, spending $50k on renovations and selling it for $450k or less. You can even add your own time into it, especially if you are doing it to make money.

This also depends on how long you plan to live in that house. It’s different for instance, if you plan on living there five years to twenty plus years.

Of course but if you renovate a kitchen and live there for 20 years then it will be due another renovation 🙂 but the general formula applies if you do the work and say sell within a 5 years while the renos are still new and modern.

If a kitchen is looked after, it should still look virtually new after twenty years. Mine did; in fact a real-estate agent thought it was new. Not everyone is rough on a kitchen, even if they cook in it most days. The main reason I would want to renovate a kitchen is to change the colour.

Rollersk8r said :

vintage123 said :

Hi there. Yes I have had direct experience with both Hotondo and C.J Gardner. Unfortunately all of my plans did not eventuate as it was going to be too expensive. The quotes were about twice the price of our budget. There is nothing really complicated about knock down rebuilding versus just building, apart from one extra task of demolition. Be careful not to over capitalise. Building in canberra is frightfully expensive, more often than not it is hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper just to sell your current house and purchase a bigger and newer version of an existing house in your suburb. The best thing about buying existing is that you can actually see what you are buying and there are minimal surprises and minimal cost shocks.

Sorry to hijack the OP but you’ve touched on some questions we’re currently considering. We have probably overspent in renovating kitchen, laundry and bathroom in our poky 3 bedroom house – and now want to extend. The bank have offered to loan us a stupidly large amount of money.

I know at the end of day you just have to work things out for yourself – but how do you decide if you’re overcaptialisihng? Who can advise on this?

If your spending more than what it is worth in money value then it is overcapitalisation. However like others have pointed out, if you intend to live there for some time then you have that time for it to increase in value, in which case the eventual investment would not be a negative return. That said, it is important to consider opportunity costs and these are the opportunities to do other things with that money over the same duration. If you borrow the money for the work then the opportunity cost consists of the capital as well as the interest you are paying on the loan. I can go into further detail if you would like.

All the TV shows, except maybe Grand Designs, create the myth that we are all natural born architect/builders and somehow can get around the builders to turn a profit on renovating an existing building.

Truth is everyone else thinks the same and underestimates the cost and pain of doing the work, and will never pay you what it actually cost. Sell them the dream, not the usually disappointing end result.

If you can find a competent and honest builder in Canberra, assuming there is such a thing, I doubt you will be letting anyone else in on the secret, you’d be keeping them to yourself.

Maya123 said :

watto23 said :

Rollersk8r said :

vintage123 said :

Hi there. Yes I have had direct experience with both Hotondo and C.J Gardner. Unfortunately all of my plans did not eventuate as it was going to be too expensive. The quotes were about twice the price of our budget. There is nothing really complicated about knock down rebuilding versus just building, apart from one extra task of demolition. Be careful not to over capitalise. Building in canberra is frightfully expensive, more often than not it is hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper just to sell your current house and purchase a bigger and newer version of an existing house in your suburb. The best thing about buying existing is that you can actually see what you are buying and there are minimal surprises and minimal cost shocks.

Sorry to hijack the OP but you’ve touched on some questions we’re currently considering. We have probably overspent in renovating kitchen, laundry and bathroom in our poky 3 bedroom house – and now want to extend. The bank have offered to loan us a stupidly large amount of money.

I know at the end of day you just have to work things out for yourself – but how do you decide if you’re overcaptialisihng? Who can advise on this?

A simple rule for over capitalising is work out how much your home cost, how much you’ve spent on renovations and look at what a similar property is selling for in the suburb. No point buying a place for $400k, spending $50k on renovations and selling it for $450k or less. You can even add your own time into it, especially if you are doing it to make money.

This also depends on how long you plan to live in that house. It’s different for instance, if you plan on living there five years to twenty plus years.

Of course but if you renovate a kitchen and live there for 20 years then it will be due another renovation 🙂 but the general formula applies if you do the work and say sell within a 5 years while the renos are still new and modern.

VYBerlinaV8_is_back said :

Ezy said :

Maya123 said :

but I now have lots of Canberra bricks, after I cleaned them, for paving. I suspect though they were recycled bricks when they went into the chimney, so now they are being recycled a third time. I picked up and wheelbarrowed the old bricks down the front stairs and out of the house

Nice work. We did a very similar thing with a knockdown of an old garage next door to us in Manuka which was built using Canberra reds. A quick conversation with the foreman and we were allowed to remove them before they got started the next day – otherwise they were going to throw them out.

A few phone calls and we had a team there at 4am removing them from the rubble. They were put to good use!

Throw them out… yeah right. They on sell them to landscape gardeners for use in paving in older suburbs.

They did require a lot of cleaning up though. It was probably in the too hard basket for them.

rubaiyat said :

Second tip use a builder with “Honest” in his name or slogan. That’s always a guarantee of good work, on time and no dragging out of work whilst he does other projects first, at your expense.

I’d probably avoid the ones that say they are dishonest.

Good advice

Third tip: Don’t make any decisions based on anonymous blog contributions. In short, you’re on your own!

Seriously though, as any viewer of Grand Designs type shows can tell you, knock-down rebuilds are not for the faint-hearted nor for people without deep pockets. Even the local building companies who specialise in knock-down rebuilds don’t promote it as a cheap option.

In my opinion, unless the existing building is a worthless wreck, it only makes sense if you really want to live in a certain location.