Is it cheaper to knock down and rebuild or renovate?

When buying a house, many Australians look at the task at hand and think hard about how they can knock their new home about to create the kind of space they want. But are they going about it the wrong way?

It takes a lot of vision to remodel a house, but what do you think you could do with a totally blank slate to start again? In some cases, just knocking the property down and starting from scratch can be cheaper and easier than trying to work with what you have, but is that always the case and how do you know what to do? Let's take a look.

What is the cost?

The biggest question is often around cost, and this factor really depends on what you want to achieve. If you're just after a bit of extra space, you can often achieve that with an extension or a conversion, but many older houses just aren't up to spec when it comes to power and appliances, and here is where the costs really mount.

Retrofitting a house in a way that keeps the structure intact is slow, fiddly, expensive work, but starting from scratch can be a lot easier. Many builders offer off-plan options that are cheaper because of the common, bulk materials that are used and the comparative ease of doing something new than fixing something old.



Efficiency savings

The cost of a build isn't just the immediate value of the materials and labour, but also the long term cost of living in a house. The more you can keep of the original fabric, the cheaper a renovation will be, but it also means using materials and appliances that are less efficient.

Everything from your boiler, to your heating, your air conditioning and even your pipes has an effect on how cheap your house is to run, and generally, older models are less efficient. Starting from scratch is a great way of ensuring that your house is made with the most modern of everything, so that everything works at maximum efficiency for years to come, costing you as little as possible.

Complete control

Starting a renovation can often be like opening a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get, and it's not always good. Knocking down walls and digging up floors can reveal anything from subsidence to infestations or sinkholes, which can add large and unexpected costs to the total expense of the project.

Starting from scratch means that you know from the beginning what your costs will be, and there can't be any nasty surprises lurking because you have total visibility over the costs. It also lets you make changes to the project as you go without knock-on effects to other parts of the project, and there are no built-in costs that can't be avoided.

Cheaper to start again

While it can be tempting to look at an existing house as a project, and demolition seems drastic, there are many ways that a clean start can be cheaper and easier than a renovation. Not only can you improve your home's efficiency, but you can also save on costs in the build itself and you can avoid any of the nasty surprises that a renovation can throw up, all while getting exactly what you want from the build.

For more information on how to arrange your demolition, and how we can help, get in touch with the Allcoast Group! We're available on 07 5476 2211 or via our online contact form.