Learn how to create a luxury renovation on a budget with Cherie Barber

Cherie Barber
October 06, 2017
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Learn how to create a luxury look on a limited budget

Homeowner Brian has been the proud owner of his large residential home in Sydney’s semi-rural Dural for the last 20 years.

Built in 2000 and featuring five bedrooms over a sprawling 200 square metre footprint, his home has been meticulously maintained, but never renovated since it was built. On a budget of roughly $60,000, my strategy was to cosmetically renovate the whole of the house internally. Due to the higher resale potential in this popular suburb, I aimed for a luxurious presentation, yet on a restrictive budget (less than half of what someone would normally spend on a property like this).

New marble lookalike tiles were laid throughout, the bare brick walls spray painted and those dated arches squared off, giving the home a luxury feel.

UPDATING THE KITCHEN

A brand new luxury kitchen would have cost a minimum of around $15,000, but I simply didn’t have the budget for that kind of outlay. Yet I needed it to look like a new kitchen, given the buyer focus on this engine room of the home. By retaining the carcasses and updating the cupboard and drawer fronts in a striking charcoal grey laminate, I saved on demolition and skip costs, and the expense of buying and installing a complete new luxury kitchen.

While CaesarStone would have been my benchtop preference in a home of this calibre ($1 million+), the budget simply didn’t allow for it, so I opted for a high-gloss laminate benchtop that mimicked the look. Similarly, I used large-format floor tiles that resembled Calacatta marble throughout the open plan living/kitchen/dining area to give the “classic contemporary” feel I knew would appeal to the well-heeled demographic of this Dural.

Plain white splash back tiles were a conservative choice that gave that crisp, clean look that I knew would appeal to the majority of buyers. And the reality is – whoever purchases the property will likely want to put their own stamp on it anyway, so the kitchen will probably be replaced in the next five or six years. Come inspection day, however, I was confident it would present as a gleaming, modern family kitchen that perfectly blended into the open plan.

REINVENTING THE MAIN BATHROOM

The main bathroom was a bit of a convoluted layout, with a separate toilet, an adjoining room housing bath and shower and then the basins outside. In an ideal world, with a bigger budget and more time, I’d probably have taken out the walls to make one big bathroom and separate toilet (certainly a necessity in a five-bedroom home!). However, I needed to work with what was there.

Instead of investing in a new “his and hers” wall-hung vanity, I used the same laminate benchtop as the kitchen, and bought two basins at $140 each to make a new top for the existing vanity, and updated the doors, handles and tapware.

Out went the peeling yellow, patterned wallpaper and the whole basin area in a light, bright colour scheme – together with some silver spray for the brassy mirror frame. It went from drab 80s to perfectly contemporary in an eye blink.

In the bathroom itself I installed a new shower screen and used White Knight tile paint for the walls. While replacing the floor tiles would have taken the bathroom to the next level, that would have triggered the need for new waterproofing as well as new wall tiles (the bottom layer of wall tiles would inevitably have been damaged) – and that was an indulgence our tight budget didn’t allow for. It was a matter of keeping the bathroom and layout we had or demolishing the lot; there was no in between.

5 x NEW LUXURY BEDROOMS

With a total of five bedrooms, there was a lot of ground to cover. A coat of paint, ceiling fans, new window dressings and mirrored wardrobes for one of the bedrooms was all that was required to give these the sleek look required for sale.