Would you please try to post the layout with wall dimensions? I think most of the designers consider "sizes" firstly..

the cost of removing asbestos will probably involve more than the bathroom so shouldn't be the deciding factor in such a big renovation and, if you intend to sell in the next ten years, focus on the most cost effective improvements not personal choices like the separate storage room for camping gear when a built in wardrobe could be more flexible.....assuming that the original house is on stumps, do you intend to remove the old low ceilinged extension and build on a concrete slab with steps down from the front rooms or do you plan to retain the original frame and add a new roof and rearrange walls? sometimes it's cheaper to demolish the old extension and start fresh but depends on condition of existing building and if the renovated home will be similar in size and value to other homes in the area but why build to the boundary and lose the options for windows on the east?... can you add dimensions to the original house plan and some photos of the roof and a description of your climate would help

Asbestos removal we found wasn't too expensive. We had it removed from our laundry walls, ceiling and floor (under the tiles!). It was around $1000, So small amount in the overall budget. Bear in mind if you are planning on renovating this bathroom at a later date you will need to remove the asbestos anyway. Best of luck with your reno.

The most important part of any project is budget.

Option 1 appears to be the cheaper one with Option 2 the more expensive one.

Option 1 alterations and additions including demolition, renovating the existing areas, perhaps repairing existing stormwater, some remedial works to existing structure you'd want to be allowing around say $300k. Depending on where you are, standard of fit out, this number will go down a bit or up. Just a ballpark and knowing nothing about the location of course.....

Not everyone likes to be able to see from the front door through to the rear.

Asbestos (like load bearing walls) is removed from projects all the time and while it carries a cost, in the whole scheme of things is not massive so forget about the impacts. If its in a bathroom it's probably elsewhere too. The builder will have removal as part of their preliminary costs.

Keep as much of the existing house as you can. I've found that many later alterations and additions need removing due to poor design with the original part the best bit to retain!

As MD has said above, budget is the ultimate project controller - so what is your budget? if you have say $100-150K then it's really only just internal rejig. If you're talking $300-400K then you can push it into a more substantial extension scope and pretty much rebuilding most of the house like both these options are doing one way or the other.

Option 1 really is not good with that old little bathroom still in the middle. If you are going this hard then best to take the opportunity to get things positioned where they are best functionally. Cost of asbestos or whatever is irrelevant on something this scale. Option 2 has it's issues, such as with building hard on the east boundary when arguably it should be flipped to the other side so you open up the north east light aspect without feeling smashed against the neighbouring boundary. That WIP is way out of whack with the balance & scale of the residence It's all about how you experience space and where you're eye is drawn and the outlook focused.

It's best not to compromise or control the design on relatively small details such as a window splashback in the kitchen. if it works and you can get it in great but it shouldn't be forced. More importantly is achieving the functional zoning, scaling and flow of the spaces.

Cheers PD

www.pauldistefanodesign.com

Thanks everyone for your comments so far. Some great points have been made and I'm going to take each one of the away to have a think about. In the meantime, I've asked my draftsman to provide me all the measurements to existing and proposed so I can share it here as soon as I get them.

Some more info:

• We're located in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.

• Our budget is approximately around the $200k...this is so we don't over capitalise on the property.

• We thought about building to one boundary because we are of the thinking that we need more width to achieve the space we want. As a guesstimate, I believe the block is 12m or so wide. Each lane way is approximately 1.5m (3m combined) which only leaves us with an internal width of 9m (minus walls). We chose to explore building to the eastern boundary because existing utilities such as hot water system, ducted heating are already setup there. Moving it to the western boundary would cost $$. The eastern laneway has nice new concrete paving and allows us to more easily access it from our carport.The other reason for potentially building to the east is because we're the 2nd last house on the street (near a corner). We get a bit of traffic on our street but more so on the street parallel the western wall. I thought it would be more peaceful moving the house away from the traffic and noise rather than towards it. Also, the addition of the dining area (connected to kitchen and alfresco) will give us a bit more privacy from the street (parallel to western wall) when we're out on the alfresco/deck. Just my thinking but happy to get some further feedback. We're happy to consider keeping the current building boundary if we can achieve the design we want etc.

I've attached a few pictures of the existing low ceilings towards the back of the house. The pics show the ceiling from kitchen and towards the back door (curtains are closed). The ceiling is about 2.4m and you can see the exposed beams which makes the ceiling feel even lower. I'm only 1.6m and I can touch them with my finger tips if I try...
Whether it's a full knock down or increasing the height of the roof, I think it's the one thing we're about improving/removing.

Hope that's some more info for everyone to go off...

Thanks again for everyone who has already replied and made some great points.

Cheers

You'll need to either double your budget or half your project scope, or find a balance between the two, unless you intend on doing most of the work yourself. I was speaking to a builder colleague recently and he reno'd his own place, a few years ago now though, similar scope at a raw cost of $250K and that was not including his own labour/time/management and paying cash for all his sub trades that would have given him bargain basement rates. I recently documented a really small job, basic fit out where it was internal only upgrading bathrooms, kitchen Laundry etc, reflooring, painting etc, similar old house to yours and that was priced at $200K by a builder with a relatively modest specification - and that was a good price. Reno's are relatively high cost/m2. Out of $200K budget take out GST and then take out builder's margin and you're back to $150K give or take, which is barely internal fit-out only on a basic quality spec.

Drafting company's generally won't deal with budget properly or robustly, because they generally don't understand how to manage design as a process to the degree of other design professionals such as architects or higher end building designers can. They'll draw you up plans which is fine, but not managing critical budget as part of the process can be a big issue. For $200K for you, it's practically an internal upgrade scenario only possibly stretching to a super super basic extension.

I managed to take some measurements with the good old tape measurer. I've drawn a rough sketch of the current floorplan dimensions. Scale is a bit out of whack but hope it gives you the info you need.

NB: the shed at the back is gone.

oklouise - I really like your floorplan. If only our block was as wide/long. I know you were working off rough estimates. Really appreciate you spending the time to nut things out. I tried to rough it out with some the measurements I have and got this...

I think where our floorplans differ the most, is that our block isn't as wide as your floorplan. If we don't take the walls to the boundary, we are required by code to have a 1m set back. Our current lanes are only 1.5 wide...so not sure it makes much sense for us to take it out by a mere 0.5m.

So I've tweaked the floorplan a little, assuming that we keep our current laneway width of 1.5m each and don't extend to the boundary. Only dilemma here is that I can't figure out if its worth building to the boundary for the tiny bit of WIP space or whether we should just suck it up and take the kitchen bench from wall to wall and give up the WIP.

As always, welcome any feedback and alteration suggestions to best floorplan for us.

Budget wise, if this requires more funds than we had hoped, then we may have to delay the renovations until we have the budget for it and do some internal rejigging/small renovation for the time being.

Really appreciate everyone's help so far.

my biggest concern is that the budget would not be enough for the proposed changes and savings can be made by minimising changes to existing roof, walls and floor so we need an aerial view of the whole existing roof and a description of roof cladding and condition to understand how to attach the extra roof and, as the ceiling in the old extension is already legal 2400 improve brightness and make a feature of the beams with gloss white paint, track lighting and skylights...thinking about traffic noise and late afternoon sun why not build to the boundary on the western side with cabinetry and no windows improving sound barrier and keep the whole extension smaller and long term, consider adding a lock up storage shed to an enlarged carport and a studio/grannyflat/rumpus room/workshop storage shed across the back fence ....this extension is only about 45sq m extension but adding the cost of new bathrooms, kitchen and laundry would easily use all the budget without very careful choice of finishes egthe difference between hinged and cavity sliding doors for the ens and wiw would equal the cost of a mid range vanity and toilet and the back of a hinged door adds a convenient extra space for an over door towel rail or clothes hooks and are also better for sound and moisture barriers...professional painting is about the cost of mid range kitchen cabinets and using simple doorways to extend the hallway through the old bathroom would be much cheaper and more interesting than attempting to make one long continuous hallway that would probably need new wall, ceiling linings and cornice and several tradespeople for several days compared to the cost of about a day's labour for one person, no major structural changes and minimal materials but assuming no major problems the biggest savings will be deciding the most cost effective footprint to suit a range of different families

thanks for all the great pointers in your previous post. please see aerial view of our existing roof. we're the middle house with a red line. current roof structure is gable until the start of current kitchen. from there onwards, it's a flat roof with a slight decline towards the back for water run. the roof is with covered with metal sheeting.

I think our problem with keeping current roofline is that the flat roof will continue to have a fall towards the backyard and by the time we add the bit of extension, it will result in a ceiling line lower than 2.4 m.

and the lower ceiling would not meet legal standards so next step is to discuss the new roof options with a builder and roof plumber before you consider any more floor plans..one option might be to leave the beamed ceiling in the old rear section and replace that part of the roof and any extension with a new gable at right angles to the roof at the front

Thanks oklouise. I have already spoken to a couple of builders who have asked me to show them the proposed floorplans. I guess I wasn't quite happy with either of the ones the draftsman had drawn and so I didn't want to waste their time consulting on a design I wasn't going to use.

One that came out on site suggested a single pitched roof/skillion? With the highest point towards north (backyard) and a fall back towards the house where it meets the existing gable roof structure. I was concerned about flooding, water build up and leaking but they were convinced a box gutter done properly would do the trick.

Some other options that were discussed prior to reaching the above suggestion were:

- pitched adjoining to existing gable (can't remember why this was dismissed, maybe cost and problems connecting to the existing roof?)

- hip roof (dismissed because we talked about building to a boundary and without a symmetrical layout they felt it may be costly or unaesthetic looking)

- flat with existing walls raised (still a possibility, but i think they favoured the pitch with the fall backwards towards existing gable roof given the orientation of the backyard is north).

I can see the 2nd floorplan design you created works well with existing walls and as I imagine it, will also allow us to retain most of the floorboards in bedrooms, WIW, maybe hallway and so I might do a draft of that and send it off to them for discussion.

Again thanks so much for your help. I'll provide an update from my discussions with the builders.

i couldn't suggest a box gutter after years of unhappy experience but that could solve the problem of the best roof shape for the extension

Keep the new external walls inline with existing.

Allows a simpler roofline = cheaper construction.

Do a roof design like the right hand side neighbour has.

Pretty cost effective and aesthetically pleasing.

Skillion cheaper but can look seriously crap if not designed or constructed well.

Never make a cheap addition look even cheaper.

I'd save money by losing the pantry and alfresco and add some money to a good looking roofline. Could also have it extending over a paved area so you get you alfresco back. Depending where you are how you intend on using the space a pergola may also work. Either way I'd lose the pantry, divide up the laundry space to fit storage/broom cupboards, etc.

Good design will achieve good spaces and be cost effective construction.