What a Home Renovation Costs in the Illawarra

Two people can renovate what looks like the same house and end up with very different bills. That isn't a trick, and it doesn't mean one of them got taken for a ride. A house renovation covers everything from freshening up a tired kitchen to stripping a place back to the frame, and the price follows the work. So take every figure here as a rough range to help you plan your home renovation, not a quote for your block.

Rough ranges, room by room

Most renovations start one room at a time, so that's a sensible place to anchor your thinking. In the Illawarra, here's the sort of ballpark we tend to see for a full, done-properly job:

• Bathroom: roughly $20,000 to $35,000 for a full strip-out and refit. Move the toilet or shower and it climbs, because you're paying for new plumbing runs.
• Kitchen: roughly $25,000 to $55,000 depending on cabinetry, benchtops and appliances. The stone and the joinery are where budgets grow.
• Laundry: usually the cheapest wet area, often around $10,000 to $20,000.
• Bedroom or living refresh: paint, flooring and a bit of joinery keeps you in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands.

Treat those as starting points, not quotes. The same bathroom can sit at either end of that range depending on the tiles you fall in love with.

Whole-home renovations

Renovating the whole house is a different animal. A cosmetic refresh, so new paint, floors, kitchen and bathroom without touching walls, is far cheaper than a structural job where you're moving rooms, adding an extension or opening up the back for light.

As a rough guide, a full house renovation in the Illawarra can run anywhere from around $150,000 into the several hundreds of thousands once you start changing the footprint. That's a wide span on purpose. Until someone has walked your place and understood what you actually want, a tighter number is really just a guess dressed up as a promise.

What actually moves your home renovation cost

When we sit down with people, the same handful of things explain most of the gap between a modest reno and an expensive one:

• Structural work. Removing a load-bearing wall means beams and engineering. Cosmetic changes don't.
• Wet areas. Kitchens and bathrooms carry the plumbing, waterproofing and tiling, so they cost more per square metre than a bedroom.
• Age and condition. Older Illawarra homes can hide rot, tired wiring or asbestos, and you don't always know until a wall comes open.
• Finishes. Tiles, tapware, stone and joinery span an enormous price range for the exact same footprint.
• Site access. A tight block on a Wollongong hillside is harder to work than a flat one with a driveway.
• Approvals. Some work is exempt, some needs a CDC, some needs a full DA through council. Check with your council or a certifier for your own place, because it affects both time and cost.

Why two quotes for the same job look so different

This is the part that trips people up. You get two prices thousands apart and assume one builder is gouging you. Usually they're just quoting different jobs.

One might have allowed for solid timber floors and stone benchtops, the other for laminate and engineered boards. One might include the demolition, the waterproofing and the fiddly bits, the other leaves them "to be confirmed" so the headline number looks smaller. One assumes your walls are sound, the other has budgeted for the surprises older homes tend to spring.

Read past the total to the inclusions. A slightly higher fixed-price proposal that spells everything out will almost always cost you less than a cheap quote that grows every few weeks.

Getting a number that means something

The honest way to price a renovation is to pin down the scope first, then the number. That's how we like to work: a proper look at the house, a clear conversation about what you want, and a fixed-price proposal so you know where you stand before anything comes apart.

If you're just after a sense of whether your plan stacks up, the ranges above are enough to start a real conversation. When you're ready for a figure tied to your actual house, that's the point where it's worth having someone local walk through it with you.