Another relatively small project on the Central Coast, where the additional space created by extensions to two separate parts of the house made a huge difference to the appearance, comfort and amenity of the residence.
Madonna owned a nice brick cottage in a quiet street in Ourimbah. Being a typical project home from the eighties the bedrooms were somewhat small and the dwelling only had a single car garage. With a very limited budget, can we extend the single garage to a double garage frontage and build a 1.5 metre extension onto the front of the main bedroom? Just as importantly, can we make it look like these additions have always been part of the original building?
Well, let's see about that....
Madonna owned a nice brick cottage in a quiet street in Ourimbah. Being a typical project home from the eighties the bedrooms were somewhat small and the dwelling only had a single car garage. With a very limited budget, can we extend the single garage to a double garage frontage and build a 1.5 metre extension onto the front of the main bedroom? Just as importantly, can we make it look like these additions have always been part of the original building?
Well, let's see about that....
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Again, our good friends at CEO Architectural were commissioned and came up with a nice set of plans for Council approval. Then, here comes the BuildFlex crew! One of the more difficult issues to resolve when constructing additions to existing houses is matching external finishes and materials, particularly brickwork and roof tiles. The brick and tile companies tend to change their ranges of colours, textures & profiles on a regular basis, so it's not unusual to find that these components are no longer available for houses which are 20-30 years old. Problems! But solutions can often be found. |
We demolished the existing brickwork by hand in a brick by brick manner to save as many as we could, and we used these on the new frontage of the building for perfect aesthetics. We also purchased new bricks which matched the old ones as closely as possible and we blended these with the remaining old bricks to complete the new side wall and rear wall. Then, when it came to matching the roof tiles we stripped existing tiles off the rear of the building and relaid them on the frontage, while installing the new roof tiles on the rear where they won't be seen. We were also able to recycle and reuse the existing bedroom and garage windows as well as most of the bedroom wall framing.
The result was a new facade which looks exactly the same as the old one. Voila!
This was a fairly easy project by the standard of some of our jobs, and the owner was thrilled that the small extension of 1.5 metres to the main bedroom had made a big difference to the internal comfort and the feel of the room. Similarly, the addition of the second garage space with a seamless integration to the existing main roof lines made the residence much more appealing from the street frontage, as well as providing the additional vehicle parking that we all need.
A great result, and just another day's work for the BuildFlex crew!
Some simple photos taken with an iPhone in the slide show above and which don't necessarily give proper justice to the new works, but they give you an idea of how we can make a couple of minor extensions seem like they have always been a part of the original residence. Who you gunna call?
Testimonial by the owner to follow:
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