Renovating a Queenslander or Character Home in Brisbane

Brisbane's pre-war housing is the reason the city looks like itself, and it is also the reason a lot of renovation projects go sideways. These houses reward the work — the ceiling heights, the light, the timber, the way a well-planned Queenslander handles a summer — but they are unforgiving of a builder who prices them like a brick-and-tile house from the seventies.

This is what we tell owners before they commit.

Character is not the same as heritage

The two words get used interchangeably and they carry very different consequences.

A heritage place is recognised for its cultural significance and is protected accordingly. Brisbane City Council describes heritage places as reflecting aspects of Brisbane's local history and culture, and the controls are correspondingly serious.

A character property is a different category. Council's framing is that character properties display key elements and features of different building styles from Brisbane's history, and that a building can have architectural value as a character property without being heritage listed. Most pre-war houses across Brisbane's north fall into the second category, not the first.

If your house is heritage listed, this article is not enough — get specialist advice before you plan anything. If it is a character house in the Traditional building character overlay, read on, because the controls are narrower than most owners fear.

What the overlay actually protects

The Traditional building character overlay applies, in Council's description, to some areas and streets of older suburbs that have a distinct identity based on building character, materials, layouts and setbacks. Council states its purpose is maintaining the traditional, pre-1947 streetscape, and that it is limited to the cohesive and visual qualities of the street.

That last clause is the one to hold on to. The overlay exists to protect what the street looks like. It is not a general instruction to keep your house in 1935.

The practical division is roughly this:

• Outside, facing the street — controlled. Council states that some extensions and renovations to a house built during or before 1946 require planning approval, and that in the overlay you will generally need planning approval for external extensions. Work involving demolition may be assessed against the Traditional building character (demolition) overlay code and the Traditional building character (design) overlay code.
• Inside — largely not. Council's guidance is that renovations only involving internal works are unlikely to need planning approval.

Council also identifies minor building work in the overlay that may not need planning approval, including enclosing under an existing building, an external stair or ramp, a carport at the front or side in specific circumstances, a carport, garage, shed or outbuilding at the rear, and raising a house where the new height does not exceed 9.5 metres. Those carry conditions, so confirm them against City Plan for your specific site rather than assuming.

For the full picture of which approvals a renovation triggers, and the difference between planning and building approval, see do you need council approval to renovate in Brisbane.

The date is the whole question

The overlay turns on whether the house was built during or before 1946. Council publishes a practice note on how the construction date of a building is determined, which exists because the answer is not always obvious from the look of a house — plenty of pre-war cottages have been re-clad, extended and modernised past recognition, and plenty of post-war houses were built in a traditional style.

Establish the date early. It changes what your project is.

What these houses hide

The regulatory side is the part owners worry about. The part that actually costs money is what is behind the linings, and it follows a fairly consistent pattern.

Single-skin walls. In many pre-war Queenslanders the internal walls are a single layer of VJ boards — the lining and the wall are the same thing, with no cavity. That has consequences in every direction: there is nowhere to conceal new plumbing or wiring, insulating means building up the wall, and a wet area cannot simply be tiled over the top. It is workable, and it needs to be designed rather than discovered.

Walls doing more than they appear to. Pre-war framing was built to conventions rather than to engineering drawings, and a century of settlement, re-stumping and previous alterations tends to shift load onto walls that were never intended to carry it. We do not assume a wall is non-structural because it looks like a partition, and neither should anyone pricing your job.

Wet areas that predate current standards. Bathrooms and laundries in these houses have usually been redone at least once, often to a standard that would not pass today. Anything built into a timber floor over a subfloor space needs the falls, the substrate and the waterproofing set out properly, and the old work removed rather than covered.

Services at the end of their life. Wiring, drainage and stormwater in a pre-war house are frequently a chronology of every previous owner's decisions. While the walls are open is the cheapest this will ever be to correct, and it is worth deciding deliberately how far to go rather than deferring the choice to the middle of the job.

Asbestos. Queensland Government guidance states that asbestos is common in houses built before 1990. That includes a great many "character" houses, because most of them were renovated during the decades when asbestos sheeting was standard — in bathrooms, laundries, eaves and under-house enclosures. If you are unsure whether a material contains asbestos, have it assessed by someone qualified before it gets disturbed. This is one of the few places in a renovation where the cautious option is also the cheap one.

Renovating one well

The character houses that come out best are the ones where the renovation is honest about which century each part of it belongs to. Keep the proportions, the ceiling height, the VJ walls and the light. Put a modern room inside them.

The bathroom we rebuilt in a Queenslander is a fair example: marble-look porcelain, a curbless walk-in shower and floor-to-ceiling joinery — a thoroughly current room — with the original raked ceiling and fretwork kept intact above it. Nothing about the result pretends to be from 1935, and nothing about it fights the house either.

Sequence it in the right order

For a character home, the order that works is: establish the construction date and the overlay position, get someone competent under the house and into the roof space before the scope is fixed, resolve the structural questions with an engineer and a certifier, then price the work.

Doing it in that order costs a few weeks at the start. Doing it in the reverse order — pricing first, investigating during demolition — is how a character home renovation turns into the story everyone has heard.