remodeling advice,home renovation ideas, renovating ideas, renovating advice,renovation advice, renovating, renovating survival, renovation survival, renovating disaster

Each fortnight I’m joining Sami and the gang on Radio Real Estate on Hot 91.1FM. Sami, Dan from Ray White, Rob from Adenbrook Homes and me, are taking a journey through The Renovator’s Survival Guide - picking out the very top tips.

In the second interview we talked about how to set a budget - unfortunately I forgot to record it! So here are the four questions to ask yourself - and we covered three of them. Avoiding over-capitalising comes next time.

1. How much can I afford to spend? Do your sums on what you can borrow (or what you’ve got in the bank).
2. What’s my ultimate goal and what are my accommodation needs? Think about how long you think you’d like to live in this home and then methodically assess your accommodation needs. Make a list of the needs and then the wants in basic terms.
3. How much should I capitalise on the house? Do your homework on other similar houses in the area, and check with local agents for prices and features.
4. Match up 1, 2, and 3 to check that it’s feasible. Do a reality check: are 2 and 3 in conflict or is number 3 more than number 1? Trade off requirements if this is the case - or say to hell with it, informed about what the gap is.

You do step four by making a little spreadsheet with the break up of the sizes of the rooms that are going to be retained and the typical sizes of the rooms you’re wanting to add. Then you calculate some ball-park costs based on rates for simply “making good” existing space and creating new space plus a typical ‘per unit’ price for some key areas - kitchen, bathrooms and deck.

Of course a critical factor in this is just what square metre prices you’re going to assume. For this I suggest the Archicentre cost guide, and a couple of different scenarios. Add it all up and see how close you are to both your budget and over-capitalising. This is the feasibility part. If you’re close, then great. If you want more than you can afford or should spend…then a masterplan may be the right approach, OR a total re-think.

Most people find it difficult to set a budget for their renovation. You might be able to afford $500,000 but does that mean it should be the budget? If you follow the steps above, you can get a quick back of the fag-pack assessment before you get in too deep into the design process and have emotions get in the way.

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I know lots of people think building is easy or at least straight forward. Don’t kid yourself though. If your building expertise is limited to hanging a painting, get an expert to help you check the building quality of your renovation - well before it’s finished.

There are enough building regulations to fill a phone book or two. I sued my builder, in part for the defective works he refused to fix. I reckon that after going through the Scott Schedule that listed all the defects, I’m up to about “L” in the builder’s phone book. That covers two things I want to mention right now: the cat’s lip and the bad lap.

Lots of people render the new additions to their renovated homes, but did you know that you’re supposed to render first and then put on the fascia and barge boards? The reason makes absolute sense when you think about it, but when you’re renovating it’s the cat door you’re more likely to think about, not the cat’s lip.

The cat’s lip is where you put the barge board and fascia on first and then render - the upper lip is behind the lower. The problem with this is that when water runs down the face of the board, it can seep in where the board meets the render. It’s made worse if the brick coursing doesn’t extend all the way up behind the fascia - as it should - to weatherproof the external walls. And water seeping in, is a problem you really don’t want to have. The issue is, will you recognise this problem?

Now let’s look at the bad lap - that’s shorthand for something I heard about just the other day. My building consultant was called out to a job with a lot of water damage from a leak in the roof. The cause? The lap of the roof sheets were not laid away from the prevailing weather. As a result, rain was driven over the one and a half ridges under the lap. Of course, this was also a shallow pitched roof, which meant the builder should have been more careful. (A bit like Steve Jackson’s builder, mentioned earlier in another defect story.)

If the cat’s lip and the bad lap are news to you, maybe think about engaging an independent assessor to check the quality of your builder’s work at each key stage. I sure wish I’d thought of that before I first renovated!

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With all this swine flu going around, it might seem merely opportunistic to add a pig to the title of this post. But then, you probably can’t see the bricklaying on my neighbour’s renovation.

My partner who’s a carpenter, frequently has a gentle whinge about brickies. (Oh, and for those who have my book about my disastrous renovation, no, he wasn’t involved in the beginning. He just rode in on his white horse later and helped me fix it.) Back to the story.

Part of the reason he has this whinge is that a carpenter has to spend loads more on his tools. (Or that’s his excuse anyway.) In fairness, a brickie rocks up to site with a wheelbarrow, trowel and if you’re lucky, their level. A carpenter rocks up to site with a ute-load.

My next door neighbour is doing a fairly major renovation - he basically pulled down the whole house leaving the front facade and is re-building everything. The bricklayers have been there recently and they’re not doing such a great job. Just this week, my partner ran into our neighbour shaking his head and muttering at his front door.

It turns out that on at least two walls, the bricklayers realised part way up the wall, that the bricks they’d laid weren’t level. (They must have left home without the level that day.) The out of level amount was a whopping 70mm. Imagine the top course of bricks running at a slope from one side to the other with a difference end to end of that much.

They thought they’d try and compensate by cutting down the height of the next course of bricks. So what you have then is basicaly a series of bricks that become kind of wedges to kind of even the whole thing up.

My partner checked it out with the neighbour and laughed himself silly. “They’ve got a pig next door he told me.” “What???” (I’d thought this weird language would stop after I learnt about a “cat’s lip” - in my book in chapter 7.)

Basically a pig is where, well, the brickies have laid the bricks out of level by one course and then tried to cut down the bricks in the  next course to make them level up.

They’d clearly never heard that you can’t put lipstick on a pig. No wonder my neighbour wants them to pull it down and start again.

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When you’ve just spent thousands on your new bathroom, the last thing you want is to rip it all up a year down the track and do it again.

I was chatting to builder and TV presenter Luke Van Dyck earlier this week and he told me it was “standing room only” at his seminar at a Sydney Home Buyer Show last weekend. I asked him what the number one question was and without any hesitation he said: “wet area failure”.

I already know that wet area defects (mostly the bathroom folks) are very common. I covered this in detail in chapter 7 of The Renovator’s Survival Guide. That chapter, Look out for trouble, begins like this:

“Finally! Building begins. Hopefully this is when all your hard work pays off. Sometimes, though, despite the most perfect preparation, things aren’t the size you imagined, or go more slowly than you thought they would. And you could discover problems in the existing building that weren’t previously apparent. In this chapter we run through the key things to loo for in construction and how and when to get them fixed.”

Ok. Honestly, I really think you should buy the book if you’re at all interested in preparing for my renovation. But in case you want something for free, and want to know how to disaster-proof your bathroom, you could check out this article I wrote a while ago for LookHome magazine, What Lies Beneath.

I know what goes under the tiles isn’t glamourous, but think of it as the great foundation!

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While building a new project home will usually be cheaper than a renovation, the launch of a new affordable housing prototype sheds some light on the design rules for cost-effective building.

You can’t really compare what your friends paid for their new project home with the quoted cost of your renovation. A new home - particularly one built by a large volume builder - is quite a different beast to your renovation.

In Chapter 1 of The Renovator’s Survival Guide I delve into the reasons why the costs of one are so much less than the costs of the other. Repeatability is one factor and bulk purchasing arrangements are another. In contrast, your renovation is a unique, customised design.

The cost differences are considerable. it might be $900 a square metre for your friend’s project home and $3,500 a square metre for your renovation. While there are some other choices - knock down and rebuild could be cheaper per square metre but more in total - is there anything you can do at the design stage to reduce the costs of construction?

I interviewed designer Brett Blacklow recently, just prior to the launch of The Smarter Small Home - a prototype of an affordable home. (The creators were aiming to produce a new home that could be sold for less than $300,000 - this is house and land. While a big driver in reducing cost is a smaller lot and therefore home, the design challenge was how to make that small home highly livable.) I know the home he designed is a new one, but I thought there were a number of points he made that were useful to renovators.

1. Choose the economical materials first

Does this seem revolutionary? Blacklow says he tried to design the structure of the house and the floor plate around the limitations of their economical materials.”Typically no-one approaches it like that,” he says. “The builder or designer comes up with a floor plan and then he works out how to make it stand up.”

Blacklow feels this is a recipe for adding all sorts of costs that aren’t immediately obvious into a building, because the designer or builder has to make the structure work. He says that with his approach “you can pare down the costs”. One example of where they did this was with the choice of floor joists. He designed the home around the most cost-effective joists he could find - 245mm by 90mm Hyne ply I-beams with a retail cost of around $8 a square metre compared with two of three times that amount for hardwood or laminated veneer lumber (LVLs).

2. Design around the size of the materials (and minimise waste)

One of the key elements of the design approach was to design rooms, heights and walls to the size of materials available. “When I buy timber, it has to be in 300mm increments,” says Blacklow. “Plasterboard is two different widths. If I’m not thinking of those things when I’m designing, then I’m potentially buying more than I need and I’m also paying someone to cut it down to the right size.”

In addition, the team has developed the design to incorporate a number of the offcuts that may be generated. For example, they use HardiFlex sheets in certain places, and then use the 600mm offcuts in another. That’s instead of using full sheets and throwing the offcuts away.

“For example, plasterers often line the inside walls by sheeting straight over a window or door and then cutting it out,” Blacklow says. Then half an hour later they need the same size as that or smaller and so they cut off a new piece of plaster.”

Because all the waste on a building site is paid for, it makes sense to minimise it.Typically, skips have to be hired and then transported to a transfer station or recycler and then fees paid on that. On The Smarter Small Home Blacklow’s team aims to reduce the total waste produced by up to 50%.

Heavy brick versus lightweight

Blacklow is well qualified to assess the real costs of construction. When he added up the bill to construct The Smarter Small Home^TM, the total came to just over $140,000 (including GST). He then calculated the cost to build the home substituting the fibre cement products with timber weatherboards and flat sheet ply cladding. He then did another calculation, substituting the piers with an ‘M’class concrete slab on flat ground, brick veneer walls instead of lightweight cladding, and a pitched concrete tiled roof using standard roof trusses. The total costs were $150,808 and $166,261 respectively, including GST.

Of course, what’s important here are the relative costs differences versus the actual numbers - as these will vary according to location and the deals individual builders make. But it does indicate that some types of construction approaches tend to me more cost effective than others. While many builder say that the concrete slab and brick veneer combination is the most cost effective, this is context-dependent.

Blacklow told me that in his view there were a number of key construction choices that tended to drive cost efficiency. Two that could easily be adopted by renovators are:

1. Using screw-in footings.

While a slab on ground requires a level pad, a raised house can be built over a small fall without incurring any real extra cost. That’s because screw-in footings don’t require excavation and don’t produce a big pile of excess soil that needs to be dumped or spread over the remainder of the site. In addition, installing the screw-in footings means two people are there over a half day, whereas a slab uses a number of subcontractor teams and happens over a one to two week period. In addition, the screw-in footings can also lower plumbing costs.Blacklow says this is because a plumber’s charge is slightly cheaper when plumbing suspended pipework under a timber framed floor than it is buried under a slab. Finally, screw-in footings can help ventilation and air flow under the old houses we’re renovating, that often have problems with rising damp.

2. Using lightweight products instead of brick veneer with steel support.

The costs of the brick veneer skin and the requirement for steel support bars over large openings and a set back upper storey makes it a more costly solution than using lightweight sheet products in this context. Blacklow says this is partly because the heavyweight brickwork requires a metal scaffold, not an aluminium one, which is more expensive to hire and the labour time required for brick installation is typically longer than sheet cladding so, again, the scaffold stays up for a much longer period of time and therefore incurs more cost.

Of course many renovations won’t have a scaffold, but they do have small sites on which it’s difficult to fit all the brick pallets that are needed. My neighbour has exactly this problem. He’s having to get his bricks there in two deliveries at least, the chippies won’t work on site at the same time as the brickies, and the whole thing could have gone a lot faster if he’d built using panel products versus brick. By the way - the bricks on the outside wall are having to be laid hand over hand from the inside! My neighbour says he’s paying the brickies double the going rate for that privilege.

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Yep, you could accuse me of being like a dog with a bone. While I was tickled to see the comments on ABC’s Unleashed site over the weekend I was disappointed that people couldn’t see it as a way of killing two birds with one stone.

Here’s one argument:

1. According to the National Greenhouse Accounts the residential sector directly generates 10 per cent of total national emissions and the indirect use of electricity within homes accounts for 8.6 per cent of total emissions. Within the home, water heaters and electrical appliances are the major GHG emitters. That seems kind of a lot to me (and importantly - within our control).
2. New housing adds a mere 2 per cent to the total number of houses in Australia each year. (There are only roughly 100,000 new detached dwelling built each year in Australia.)
3. There are already about 160,000 ground and upper floor renovations done each year. There’s also a lot of unrenovated housing stock.
4. The government is mooting more stimulus measures - why not introduce one that pulls forward the timing of renovation demand but steers it to reward those investments that improve the energy efficiency of existing housing stock - instead of always being so focused on new homes?

Joe Blow, a commenter on the ABC site is one who seems interested in these types of ideas. He wrote:

“Many of these comments are focussed on the justice of the proposed measure. I doubt if that’s really relevant. I don’t look on the negative gearing measures as a question of fairness or not. Taxes and tax rebates are a tool of the government to achieve a particular outcome (eg invest in extra properties) - the main criterion for them is whether they actually achieve what they set out to do. So that’s how I would judge this proposed measure - would it actually achieve transformation of our existing housing stock (particular with regard to energy efficiency, which is what I am interested in personally)? Are there any unexpected “stings in the tail” or loopholes? That’s what I would be interested in comments about.”

Others are also talking about the re-use and adaptation of existing buildings, albeit in some different contexts. This morning architectural historian, writer and critic Aaron Betsky joined Alan Saunders (listen to the interview here) on ABC radio’s By Design. He spoke about the idea that maybe we don’t need to just make a new building, maybe we need to re-think existing ones.

“It’s not always about coming up with the newest bauble,” Betsky said. People need to think differently about the spaces we already have.

Of course, Australia already has some measures that are designed to steer some energy efficiency improvements. But I still like those Canadians - even if some commenters decried the HRTC as “another stupid idea, this time from Canada”. I like the way the Canadians Eco-energy Retrofit is one complete, aparently well thought-out package.

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Earlier in the week I wrote a piece on ABC’s Unleashed about why Kevin Rudd should introduce a Home Renovation Tax Credit. Boy, did that post draw the crabs! I don’t think I made one key point clearly enough.

The suggestion of a Home Renovation Tax Credit is borne out of my frustration with the futility of the most recent batch of cash handouts.

Frankly I see it as a failed measure and therefore largely a waste of money. Huge numbers of people are merely saving their handout and so it has done, and I believe will do, little to stimulate the economy.

This was part of Blanchard’s point about government’s focusing on measures that pull forward the timing of demand instead of just handing out wads of cash.

There sure is a lot of demand for renovation. (And while it has lows and highs it is generally not as cyclically affected as other parts of the building industry like new homes.)

The point of the tax credit is to pull some of that demand forward but ONLY reward people AFTER they’ve made their investment in materials and labour.

Is it the only measure one would consider? Of course not. But my point is, that within the context of more stimulus measures being considered, I’d rather see a measure like this, than another round of cheques that will be a waste of money.

(There was one recent commenter who is interested in the whole idea of using measures like this to yes, drive demand, but also drive the sustainable adaptation of existing housing stock.That’s a pet favourite of mine, so I’ll save that for an extended post in a couple of days.)

One final thing - to the Hudson Geoffrey person. He’s accusing the ABC of advertising some mysterious business I may have that will benefit from the post on Unleashed. Mr Hudson Geoffrey: there is no business. I merely went through years of hell trying to use our legal system to seek redress from a shoddy builder and was so irritated at the system’s flaws (and so clear about the things we as consumers overlook) that I sat down and wrote a helpful guide to renovating.

Sure I get a royalty - but it isn’t enough to pay for the next renovation, believe me!

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A 5mm mistake meant 5 years of broken dishes. If only there’d been more attention to detail this could have been avoided.

A lot of people believe that Miele appliances are top of the range. You certainly pay enough for them. So when poor installation means you can’t fully open your new Miele dishwasher it’s enough to make you spit chips.

Jackie had her kitchen completely renovated about five years ago. Part of the renovations included the installation of a new Miele dishwasher with an integrated front - that’s where there’s a veneer panel attached to the front so that it looks just like the surrounding cupboards. Miele, like most appliances that allow integrated fronts, has a detailed set of specifications that kitchen manufacturers should follow. The spec details lots of things including the required heights and dimensions for integrated panels.

After the kitchen and the appliances had been installed Jackie found that she couldn’t open the dishwasher door to its full 90 degrees; she could only open it part of the way. Jackie could see immediately that there was a problem. She called the kitchen installer back but he said there was something wrong with the dishwasher. She called in the Miele guy who shook his head and said: “This often happens. These installation guys just don’t take the time to read our specs. The problem is that the installer has made the front panel too long so it’s hitting the body of the dishwasher concealed by the kickboard.

This only becomes apparent when you open the door.

Jackie tried to get the kitchen installer to fix it. No wonder he wasn’t very enthused. (And of course, she’d already paid his company by this point. )

To fix it properly would have meant removing all the other fronts and doors because if he’d just shortened the one in front of the dishwasher it wouldn’t have been level with all the others - which would have looked very noticeable. Another option would have been to shorten the panel on the front of the dishwasher, and put it on sliding grooves so that it could shift when opened.

Sound complicated? It is. And if the kitchen manufacturer had been paying enough attention to detail, Jackie wouldn’t even be needing to explore it.

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Each fortnight I’m joining Sami and the gang on Radio Real Estate on Hot 91.1FM. Sami, Dan from Ray White, Rob from Adenbrook Homes and me, are taking a journey through The Renovator’s Survival Guide - picking out the very top tips.

Listen to this episode where we discuss the top three problems to avoid.

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