Ground and first floor addition

Many years ago our clients, Chris and Catherine, built a spec home. The spec home worked for them at the time but over the years they had outgrown the space. The home now needed to accommodate two parents as well as three adult children.

When they built originally with the spec home builder, they weren't allowed to customise the design to suit their needs. Even after all these years, there were still features they wanted in their home that were really important to them that were not included in the original design.

When searching for a builder, Chris and Catherine had trouble finding one that would take the time to listen to what they needed and work with them to find the design. They wanted someone to work with them in planning to make their dream achievable.

With their youngest son completing their HSC, they needed a builder who could be flexible with scheduling. We worked with the family to find a time that the construction would cause the least amount of impact. This meant we booked the project in and had it on hold for over a year until the time was right.

For Chris and Catherine it was important that the builder understood this was a home and not a worksite. Chris works from home and the family wanted to remain in the home while the work was undertaken.  This meant careful consideration needed to be taken when noise was made, when utilities were disrupted and to ensure dust was minimal.

The final challenge our client had was that the spec home was missing some pretty key features. It only had a laundry the size of a cupboard and there was minimal storage. With such a large family, as you can imagine, these things are critical. The spec home also  lacked internal access to the garage.

We listened to Chris and Catherine's needs. We planned a path forward and we found ways to accommodate what they wanted to achieve.

We engaged our designer to help Chris and Catherine with a wholistic design to deliver exactly what they needed to create a comfortable home. We also undertook the DA process and worked with Hills Shire Council to obtain the necessary approvals.

To create the space our client needed, we looked outside the square. Their original house had dead space in their yard and above the garage that we could use to create a first floor addition. This allowed us to add over 20 square metres of space to the upstairs level. We used this space to expand two existing bedrooms as well as create a multipurpose room and an additional bedroom.

On the ground level, we added a new bathroom and a large, modern laundry which is now practical for doing all the washing required for this family. The laundry also features plenty of storage space. We also created direct internal access to the garage from the main living area.

One of the important things about this addition was to make the new building works integrate seamlessly on the outside so it didn't look like an addition was stuck on to the house. To do this we salvaged the original bricks during the demolition to ensure the new brickwork on home's façade was perfectly matched. A similar process was used for the roof tiles. The aim in any addition is to make the new part of the house look like it was always there.

We are pleased to say Chris and Catherine are ecstatic with the finished result and that makes us very happy.