Over 100 years old and well past her prime, many would have thought this old lady was destined for a date with a bulldozer.

But not our clients – they were fully committed to restoring her to her former glory and entrusted us with the challenge.

It was a big task to bring her back up to scratch and prepare her for her new life as a commercial office building for a well-known, local real estate agency in Canterbury.

Rotten framing, rotten cladding and rotten flooring meant that the place need to be stripped externally and gutted internally. The building was fully re-piled, and the interior layout was redesigned to accommodate the new office layout. Being a commercial premise, the building needed to meet current fire standards which included fire wall on two exterior walls.

We fully refit the place with new aluminium joinery except for the timber bay window at the front, as it was important to our client that some original character remained. This, along with the restored fret work on the front of the building give a definite nod to her past life. Old weather boards were replaced with new timber boards, as well as Hardies Villa board in some places.

This was a big job with plenty of head scratching involved, but renovation projects don’t get more rewarding than this one. High risk = high reward was certainly the case here, for both us as the builder and our client!