North Sydney is one of the most apartment-heavy suburbs in the country. The stock spans six decades, and which decade your building came from decides most of what your renovation costs.
We only renovate apartments. The age of your block sets more of the price than the finishes you choose, which is why we read the building before we quote.
What is different about renovating in North Sydney
Six decades of apartment stock in one suburb
More than eight in ten homes in North Sydney are flats or apartments, and they were not all built in the same decade. The ridges running out towards Waverton and Wollstonecraft are mostly walk-up brick blocks from the 1960s and 70s. In between sit the full-brick mid-rise blocks: the North Sydney apartment further down this page is in one from 1995, with the original kitchen and bathrooms still in place after thirty years. Around the station and the Victoria Cross metro entrance, open since August 2024, the towers keep going up. A stair carry, a booked service lift and a loading dock window are three different pricing assumptions, and we set the right one at quoting stage.
Kirribilli and Milsons Point sit inside conservation areas
The Kirribilli planning area alone carries three heritage conservation areas under North Sydney Council's controls: Kirribilli, Jeffreys Street and Careening Cove. Some of the flats inside them went up between 1936 and 1940 as garden complexes, and anything visible from the street there draws more attention than the same change would three blocks north. Inside the apartment the ordinary strata rules apply. What adds a council conversation to the strata one is external work: a window, a balcony screen, a new vent. We check the heritage mapping before we draw anything that touches the facade.
The older blocks keep their services inside masonry
A brick block from the 1960s or the 1990s puts the plumbing and the wiring inside solid walls and a concrete slab. Moving a wet area there means core drilling and re-waterproofing above somebody else's ceiling, not lifting a floorboard, and what is behind the tiles only shows itself on strip-out. We carry a 15 to 20 percent contingency on buildings of that age and put it in the quote rather than in a variation. The newer towers trade that problem for a scheduling one: lift bookings in fixed windows, same-day waste removal, weekday work hours, and a professional strata manager whose meeting calendar does not bend for one apartment.
This is the part we carry. We prepare the application and the by-law, deal with the strata manager, book the lift, work inside the building's hours, and hand you the waterproofing certificate at the end. More than 1,000 Sydney apartments across 30 years, and Fine Touch Group holds NSW Builder Licence 151772C.
