More than half the homes in Ryde are flats, against a fifth across NSW. They come in two kinds that renovate nothing alike: ageing brick low-rise with no lift, and the towers built at Meadowbank and Top Ryde since 2009.
Most kitchen and bathroom renovators in Sydney build for houses. A unit is a different problem, and the building decides most of it.
What is different about renovating in Ryde
The walk-ups have no lift and nowhere to stage
Ryde is a flat suburb by the numbers. At the 2021 Census 55.7 percent of occupied homes in Ryde were flats or apartments, against 21.7 percent across NSW, with West Ryde at 46.3 percent. A large share of that is low-rise brick, the three-storey walk-up that filled Australian suburbs through the 1960s and 1970s, and a walk-up has no lift by definition. Our Ryde project was a full-brick block of 15 units from 1978, so every sheet of stone, every box of tiles and every bag of waste moved up and down an external stair by hand. There is rarely anywhere on site to stage a delivery either, which is why we schedule materials to arrive in the order the work needs them.
Fifty-year-old services behind full brick
Full brick fixes where the services run. A wall carrying load is not a wall you chase a new waste line through, which is why a kitchen or bathroom that keeps its footprint costs a good deal less in these blocks than one that moves. What sits behind the brick is as old as the building. Australian plumbing moved to copper for water supply after the Second World War, so a block of this era is usually running copper pipe now in its sixth decade, alongside wiring of the same age. We carry a 15 to 20 percent contingency on buildings that old and say so at quoting stage rather than in week one.
Meadowbank towers, Denistone houses
The other half of the local stock is new and tall. Meadowbank is 96.8 percent flats, built out through the Shepherds Bay renewal that the state approved in 2013 in buildings of eight to eleven storeys, and seven towers holding 653 apartments were finished above Top Ryde City in 2014. Those buildings run on booking sheets: a service lift in a fixed window, a loading dock, same-day waste removal and weekday work hours. None of it is a problem when it is priced at the start. North Ryde sits between the two at 30.2 percent flats, and the Macquarie Park rezoning is adding to that.
Denistone reads the other way. Fewer than 2 percent of its homes are flats, and two of the eight heritage conservation areas in the Ryde LEP sit there, at Chatham Road and the Darvall Estate. In a conservation area the consent rules cover the outside of the building, so a kitchen or bathroom done inside the existing walls of a house that is not itself a listed item generally sits outside them. We check the listing before we quote either way.
This is the part we carry. Across 30 years and more than 1,000 Sydney apartments we have learned to price the building as well as the room. We prepare the strata application and the by-law, deal with the strata manager, plan the carry or book the lift, work inside the building's hours, and hand over the waterproofing certificate at the end. Fine Touch Group holds NSW Builder Licence 151772C.
