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Before You Begin

You want to know your estimated costs right so you can workout if you can afford to do this extension before spending thousands drawing up your plans to submit to council.

But before the builder will quote you they want floor plans, engineering plans or perhaps even confirmation your Development Application (DA) certificate has been approved by council just to make sure you are committed to the house extension.

It's costly exercise to draw up or submit all this paperwork to council only find out the house extension was always beyond your budget.

Budget

How much will this extension cost so I can budget accordingly?

At this stage, prior to having formal plans drawn up by a draftsman or architect, I was quoted estimated per metre costs of $2,500 m2 for brick veneer or $3,000 m2 for double brick and reluctantly by most.

For me I used the per square costs to help gauge what my costs will be and compared it across multiple builders but that said it was a lot more in the end. Hopefully this article helps you better understand your overall costs as it's really the driving force behind writing it.

You can access my final fees to get a clear breakdown of my overall costs for the house extension.

Referrals

If you have no house extension plans and want more than square metre costs from builders my advice would be to simply ask these questions:

  1. Have you done similar work such as a house extension before?
  2. What was the cost of the previous job(s) and address?

I know this sounds like very logical questions to ask but for whatever reason I never managed to get hold of this information and was forever pulled back into the per metre cost conversation.

Acknowledge to the builder you are not going to hold them to this figure given the differences in sizes, materials, location .etc you are simply need a price guide to understand if you can afford to do an extension and to be able to visualise the end result.

Note always remember you are looking for a reputable builder not the cheapest.

Tip

If you are struggling to find a builder or don't know where to start an idea I figured out later on was all the builders need to engage with suppliers for windows such as:

I would pop in to their stores and ask them what reputable builders are in demand on their books?