What CMD builds
Large-scale renovations in Byron Shire
A renovation that changes how the house works, rather than how it looks. It’s half of what Cade does.
The scope
What counts as large-scale.
A renovation that changes how the house works, rather than how it looks. That’s the line, and it’s the half of CMD’s work that has never had anywhere to live on the website.
Cade takes on two kinds of work and only two: new custom homes, and renovations at a scale that changes the plan of a house. Not a repaint, and not a bathroom on its own. If you’re moving walls, adding rooms, opening a house to the north or turning space you already have into space you can live in, that’s this page.
The biggest one so far
Myocum Magic, on Kingsvale Road, is a renovation. There was a house on the site already; CMD built a new living space, a new deck and the laundry, did the exterior stain and the landscaping, and the work ended up reworking almost all of what was there. It is the most photographed project on this website and it sits on the front page.
See what the extension did to it, and note the design is Brently Reid’s of EcoSphereDesign rather than ours.
Three shapes this work usually takes:
- Reworking the plan. The house has the floor area but the rooms are in the wrong places, the living space faces the wrong way, or the kitchen is in a corner nobody wants to stand in.
- Adding on. Extending out or up, or putting a deck and an outdoor room on the back so the house finally opens to its own garden.
- Converting what’s already there. A garage, an under-house space or a disused wing turned into somewhere someone can actually live. CMD has converted a double garage into a self-contained living area for a client’s mother.
The difference
What a renovation asks that a new build doesn’t.
A new house starts from a clear block and a set of drawings. A renovation starts from somebody else’s work, and that changes the job in four ways worth knowing about before you price one.
You find things out by opening it up
What’s behind the wall, under the floor and inside the roof is only ever partly knowable in advance. Footings, framing, wiring and plumbing on an older house are frequently not what the drawings say and occasionally not what any drawing says. A builder pricing a renovation honestly will tell you which parts of the number are firm and which are an allowance, and will say so before you sign rather than in a variation afterwards.
Older houses were built to older rules
Bring an existing house substantially into a renovation and parts of it come up to current standards with it: waterproofing, glazing, balustrades, smoke alarms, energy performance, sometimes the structure. Houses of a certain age also need to be checked for asbestos before anything is cut into, which is a licensed job and a real line in the programme.
The sequence has to work around a house that already exists
Access, where materials get stacked, which services can be switched off and for how long, and what has to be weather-tight before the next thing starts. On a renovation the order of work is most of the skill.
Somebody may be living in it
Staying put through a renovation can be done and it’s often the right financial call, but it changes the programme, the cost and the noise. It’s worth deciding early rather than halfway through, and it’s one of the first things the enquiry form asks, because the answer changes what’s worth talking about first.
Approvals
Whether yours needs council.
Some renovation work is exempt, some can go through as complying development, and some needs a development application. What tips it from one to the next is usually whether you’re touching the structure, changing the footprint, altering the roofline, or building in a bushfire, flood or heritage area.
One client describes Cade helping with the design and the layout and handling the liaison with council from their first meeting. That’s the useful version of this: the person building it is also the person who has been through the approval before.
In their words
Two clients on renovation work.
Both of these are on CMD’s current website and both are quoted here exactly as they were written.
Thank you Cade for the amazing job you have done on our renovation! Nothing was too much trouble for you, and you were always there with great advice and idea’s. When we requested a couple of changes from our initial plans, you seamlessly made it happen.
My husband and I employed CMD Constructions when we decided to convert our double garage into a self-contained living area for my mother. We found Cade to be extremely helpful from our initial meeting, when he helped us with the design and layout, liaison with council, and working within our budget.
The cover
What’s covered, and for how long.
The same two commitments come with a renovation as with a new house.
- Maintenance and defects
- 12 months. Covers the first twelve months after your build is finished. Defects in the work that show up in that time are reported to Cade and put right by him.
- Structure
- 6 years. Covers the structure of the building.
- Stated when
- Before you engage CMD, not after, so you can hold them next to the other builders you’re talking to.
Worth asking every builder, not just this one
Ask what sits inside each of those two covers before you sign anything. It’s a fair question and it has a real answer. Nothing on this page claims either one is longer than it is, broader than it is, or better than anybody else’s, because a builder who inflates a guarantee on his website is telling you something about how he’ll describe a variation later.