The shape of it
Design, approve, price, build.
Four movements, nine stages. The first four are easy to change and the last four are not, which is why most of the thinking belongs at the front.
- Who runs it
- One person. Brad prices the job, engages the trades, runs the site and hands the house over. There is no estimator, salesperson and site supervisor to be passed between.
- What it costs to start
- A message with an address and a rough brief, and an hour on the block. Nothing is signed until the drawings are finished and the sum is on the table.
- Where the price appears
- Stage six, from finished drawings. A number quoted before that is a guess wearing a suit, and it is the single most common way a build ends up costing more than the quote.
- How long it takes
- It depends on the block, the approval path and the size of the house — which is why the program is agreed in writing before you commit to a lease, rather than estimated optimistically at the start.
Stage by stage
What happens, and what you end up holding.
First contact
Send an address and a rough brief — what you want, roughly what you have to spend, and when you would like to be in. If there are already drawings or an approval, send those too.
A conversation, booked
Site visit
We walk the block together. Fall, access, trees, sewer, easements, orientation, and what the neighbours have already been allowed to build. On a rebuild we walk the existing house as well.
A straight answer on what the block will take
Brief and budget
What the house actually has to do — how many people, how they live, what the existing house gets wrong — set against a real number. Both written down, because a brief without a budget is a wish list.
An agreed brief and a budget to design against
Design
Plans drawn by the architect we work with, around the site and the brief, with Brad involved the whole way through — suggesting, questioning, and costing the drawings as they develop rather than after. This is the easiest stage at which to change your mind, and the one worth taking slowly.
A plan you have seen, changed and agreed
Approvals
DA or CDC depending on the block and the proposal, along with engineering and certification. Managed through to consent — you are not the one chasing a certifier you have never spoken to.
Consent, and the engineering behind it
Pricing
A lump sum built from the finished drawings. Provisional sums and prime cost items are listed separately, so you can see which numbers are fixed and which are allowances against things nobody can know yet.
One contract sum, and both allowance lists
Contract
You read it before you sign it, including both allowance lists and how variations are priced. Home Building Compensation Fund cover is arranged through icare NSW and the certificate is issued for your job, before work starts and before any deposit is taken.
A signed contract and an HBCF certificate
Construction
Trades engaged and sequenced by the person who priced the job. Conventional stick framing built on site, so a wall can still move while the house is going up. Nothing changes before you have heard about it and agreed to it in writing.
The house, on the sum you signed
Handover
Walked room by room with the same person who quoted it. Defects listed and closed out. Statutory warranty and HBCF cover stand behind the work after you move in.
The keys, and someone who still answers
The part people ask about
Where the price actually comes from.
A builder who gives you a figure at stage two is guessing, and the gap between that guess and the real number has to be found somewhere later — usually in the specification, sometimes in a run of variations.
Pricing from finished drawings takes longer and produces a number you can plan around. Two things still sit outside it on every job in this industry: provisional sums and prime cost items, which are allowances for what is not yet chosen or not yet knowable, and variations, which are work you ask for that was not in the signed scope.
Both lists are handed over with the contract, itemised, before you sign anything. Ask every builder you talk to for the same thing.
Same process, four kinds of job
It runs the same way whatever you are building.
A rebuild adds demolition at stage eight. A renovation front-loads what is unknown into stage six as written allowances. Everything else is the same sequence.
Custom home builds
A house drawn around your block and the way you live, not adapted from a catalogue plan.
View →Knockdown rebuilds
Keep the land, replace the house. Demolition, approvals and the build on one contract.
View →Renovations & additions
Second storeys, ground-floor additions and whole-home reworks, priced before demolition.
View →Pools & landscaping
The outside finished to the same standard as the inside, by the same team.
View →
Start a conversation
Stage one is a message with
an address and a rough brief.
No obligation, no sales appointment, and no number invented before anyone has walked the block.