The owner had purchased this Dianella property with a clear objective: renovate it fully and then move in. It was a generous home — larger than the average Perth renovation project, with a substantial kitchen and open-plan dining area, a large living room that needed structural work to open it up properly, an alfresco and pool area that had been left to deteriorate, and a scope of work that touched virtually every room in the house.
The property was clean in all the ways that matter most. No asbestos was identified in the wall linings or ceiling surfaces. No galvanised supply pipes were found. The electrical installation was assessed and found to be compliant throughout. No lead paint was identified. For a Dianella home of this era and scale, a clean structural and services baseline meant the renovation could proceed without the additional cost and timeline impact of hidden works remediation.
The brief was contemporary throughout — the gold-and-dark kitchen palette seen in the before photographs gives some indication of the direction the client was heading. The herringbone timber floor running from kitchen through living through to the alfresco deck was the single most important design decision, creating visual continuity through what is effectively a large open-plan family home.
This project should have taken four months. It took twelve. The renovation itself — the structural work, the kitchen, the alfresco, the floor — is all excellent. The extended timeline had nothing to do with the quality of the work or the complexity of the build. It had to do with communication.
In a renovation of this scale, decisions need to be made at specific points in the build sequence. The kitchen cabinetry cannot be manufactured until the design is finalised and signed off. The floor cannot be laid until the layout decisions that affect it are confirmed. The alfresco structure cannot be completed until the materials are approved. Each decision is a gate — and when the client is slow to respond to questions, slow to approve selections, or unavailable for the decisions that need to be made before the next trade can start, every gate creates a delay.
That is what happened here. The client was genuinely difficult to reach throughout the project. Decisions that should have taken two or three days to turn around were taking two or three weeks. In some cases, trades that had been booked and were ready to start had to be rescheduled because the preceding decision hadn’t been made — and in Perth’s 2025 and 2026 trade market, rescheduling a licensed trade means waiting for the next available slot, not the following Monday
The total delay from client communication: approximately eight months added to a four-month project. The renovation itself ran on schedule every time it was running. The gaps between active construction periods were almost entirely attributable to pending decisions.
The result was still delivered. The $500,000 value uplift was still achieved. The owner moved in. But the twelve months of holding costs — mortgage, rates, insurance on a property that could have been occupied eight months earlier — was a real cost that the extended timeline created.
What every homeowner can take from this
A renovation is not just a construction project. It is a collaboration between the client and the renovation company. The company manages the trades, the schedule, and the quality. The client manages their decisions. When one side of that collaboration is consistently slower than the schedule requires, the project extends — and that extension has costs that fall on both sides.
If you are planning a renovation — particularly a full house renovation where decisions compound — be realistic about your own availability. House & Co will give you a clear decision schedule at the start of every project: what needs to be confirmed and when. The timeline we quote is achievable when decisions arrive on time. Every week of delay in a decision is, typically, more than a week added to the project completion date
The photographs answer the question of whether the result was worth it. The kitchen is one of the most considered in any House & Co project — the two-tone dark and white cabinetry with brushed gold hardware, the herringbone mosaic splashback, the gold globe pendants, and the split-level floor remediated to a single continuous plane. It is a kitchen that was designed and built to a clear vision, even if arriving at that vision took longer than it should have.
The living room skylight is the structural decision that defines the space. The before photograph shows a room stripped to the slab with raw brick openings where walls were being demolished. The after photograph shows a room flooded with light from a large pyramid-profile skylight overhead, herringbone floor running wall to wall, and bifold doors opening to the garden and alfresco beyond. The scale of the structural work involved in that transformation is visible only if you know what you’re looking for.
The alfresco and pool tell the simplest before-and-after story of the three rooms shown. The same pergola structure — same footprint, same roof profile — painted white, fitted with a modern fan, strung with festoon lights, and opened to a resurfaced pool behind glass fencing. The herringbone deck tiles connecting the indoor floor to the outdoor space are the detail that makes it feel intentional rather than coincidental.
Approximate value uplift: $500,000. The owner moved in at the end of twelve months. The home they moved into is exactly what was designed at the start of the project — which is also exactly what a fixed-scope quote is meant to deliver, regardless of how long the journey to get there takes.
“I know I wasn’t the easiest client when it came to making decisions quickly. I’ll own that. But House & Co were patient throughout, never dropped the quality of the work, and what they delivered in the end is everything I wanted. The kitchen is spectacular. The living room with the skylight is a completely different house to what I bought. I’d use them again.”
About Project | Details |
Suburb | Dianella, WA |
Project type | Full House Renovation |
Home age & type | Owner-occupier — pre-1990, brick |
Design style | Contemporary |
Rooms renovated | Kitchen · Living room · Alfresco & pool · Throughout |
Structural work | Wall removal (living to alfresco) · Skylight installation · Split-level floor remediated |
Key design thread | Herringbone engineered timber floor — kitchen to living to alfresco deck |
On-site duration | 12 months |
Cause of timeline | Client decision delays — not construction complexity |
Asbestos managed | No — none identified |
Replumbing | No — existing plumbing compliant |
Delivered to scope | Yes ✓ — fixed-scope quote honoured |
Compliance certs | Electrical + Plumbing |
