What’s involved in turning a 1930s bungalow into a light-filled haven?

Listen as homeowner, Sophie, shares renovation tips and lessons from her experience of renovating her Californian Bungalow home.

Listen to the episode now.

Hello! This is Episode 340, and in it, I’m talking with homeowner and HOME Method member, Sophie, about the renovation of her Californian bungalow in Perth, Western Australia.

Sophie and her partner finished their renovation project in April 2023, just 6 weeks before they welcomed their first child, a baby girl, into the world, and brought her home to their newly created renovation. 

There’s nothing like a baby’s due date to put pressure on project deadlines! And, if you don’t have kids already, it can be tricky to design a home that will suit a growing and changing family, especially over the long term.

However, as you’ll learn from my conversation with Sophie, she has so much helpful information to share about how she and her partner:

• purchased the right property to renovate
• how they thought about their design
• how they selected their team
• and the way she navigated her project journey, confidently implementing her learning and research.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE NOW.

And given the project was carried out during some of the most challenging COVID times, in one of the most separated locations in Australia at that time, you’ll hear how they kept things on track both time and budget-wise as well.

I’m so looking forward to sharing this conversation with you – I think it’s going to be super helpful as it’s packed full of great tips and ideas for anyone building or renovating.

Let me share a bit of timeline information with you for context.

So, Sophie joined HOME Method in August 2020. Soon after, in October 2020, she dived into the design process. 

Construction commenced around 14 months later, in December 2021, and the project took 15 months overall, with completion in April 2023. 

So, the whole project took roughly 2.5 years from start to finish – which is actually fairly common for a renovation project of this nature. 

Here’s Part 1 of my conversation with Sophie.

This is the transcript of my conversation with Sophie with her renovation tips and lessons from renovating her 1930s bungalow …

Amelia Lee
Well, Sophie, it is so awesome to have you here. I’ve been so looking forward to having this conversation with you, because you’ve been a long time member of HOME Method. You have a completed project that you’ve done with the support and help of HOME Method, and I’ve got to know you, of course, through the Facebook community and seeing your project progress and what you’ve shared on your social media account as well. But to be having this conversation with you is just a really beautiful opportunity to dive more into the details of your project journey, and I know that you’re going to have loads of wisdom to be able to share with the Undercover Architect community that’s going to be super helpful. So I’m wondering if you can kick off by just telling us a little bit about you and your family and who’s in it, who this project actually was for when you embarked on renovating your home?

Sophie
Yeah, sure. Well, thanks so much for having me, Amelia. I think you’re the reason I’ve got a lovely home to talk about. So, yeah, very grateful. Yes. So our home, it’s myself and my now husband. We weren’t married before, but he still married me after this whole process. So that’s quite lucky. And when we first bought our house, it was us two and three animals. And subsequently, we’ve had our one year old who was born about six weeks after we moved back into our finished home. So it was pretty well timed, from that point of view, not that we had any control over that timing. So we’re both full time medical specialists. Neither of us had ever really renovated before. I’d always been interested in home design and home building, and I used to play with Lego when I was little and do floor plans. That was my kind of Lego building when I was little. And I’ve always wanted to build a home that was exactly just so, in exactly how I wanted everything to be. And I found that the houses that we were looking at, I was just looking around and needing to undo other people’s design decisions. 

In terms of when we went down the process of looking to buy a house, we were actually living in a rental together, and it was miserable. It was cold and dark in winter, and it was boiling and dark in summer, and I just didn’t enjoy being there. I didn’t enjoy coming home. It didn’t feel like a haven. And I started listening to your podcasts on my morning walks with the dog, and just gobbled it all up and knew that I’d found a resource that was going to educate and empower me and get me through the process that was really daunting. In terms of picking a home and designing the home, it was before we’d had kids, and we weren’t really sure if we were going to going to have kids, going to be able to have kids, and it was really tricky to work out whether we would build a home for a potential family in future that we didn’t know. We didn’t know what our family unit was going to look like in terms of choosing a home that was appropriate for that and designing around it. And during the design process, we lost several pregnancies during that process, which was tough, but also the same boat as many people, and that was really the only decision that we made that was also based on resale value. In case we didn’t end up with a family, it made sense to build and design a family home for the area that we were in. But otherwise, we designed exactly for us. 

We built for us. We were planning for it to be our forever home. But we also had to bear in mind, how do we live? How do we entertain? What’s our family setups, or our wider family set up? So at the time when we were looking, both my husband and my families were all either interstate or overseas, so we knew that when we have people stay, it’s for weeks or a couple of months at a time, and we had to factor that into how do you design your guest spaces, and what sort of spaces do you need for that, as opposed to we might have the odd people for the odd weekend here and there. We’ve had lots of families stay for a long period of time, so that influenced the type of property that we looked for and how we would build around it. And now we’re in our forever home, and I don’t ever want to move.

Sunlight streaming deep into the finished living area during Winter Solstice [SOURCE]

Amelia Lee
Thank you for sharing that. Because I know that that search for the right kind of property can be a tricky one. I suppose, when you were looking for that property, knowing that you were wanting to create a specific outcome and you were juggling… I know that when I’ve looked at properties, it’s like, how much existing work do I have to undo versus how bare bones is this to be able to then create the next iteration of this project that’s going to realise the full potential of this home? What were your key criteria, I suppose, as you were starting to sift and filter through those properties that you were looking at?

Sophie
So we were looking in a specific area. So both of us work at the same hospital in town. We both are in critical specialties where we need to be within a certain distance when we’re on call and we need to go in in a rush overnight. So we were looking in a specific area, we both liked older style houses. So we were both looking for an older style house on a certain size block and a certain zoned block. There’s a bit of rezoning happening in terms of property densities in the area that we are in at the moment, and we needed to make sure that our property was in the right zoning and our neighbours weren’t going to knock down and build five townhouses. So getting into detail with the council plans for the area is something that we definitely looked into. 

And then having started out listening to your podcasts, listening about site orientation, the house that we found eventually was a older style house. It was on a R10 zoning so it’s 1000 metre block, but it was a small house, about that 100 square metre old little house, two by one that had nothing done to it, but was on this big, empty flat block, east to rear, south of the highway, in the area that we wanted. There wasn’t a lot of design decisions to undo, and the previous owners had put in a fairly new swimming pool at the back, but had done absolutely nothing to the house. So we didn’t need to factor in a big, expensive landscaping, big chunk for a swimming pool, because that has already been done, but we had a blank canvas in terms of the actual build plans. 

The house itself, a little 1930s bungalow, lovely little cottage with beautiful features, two bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, an old kitchen in the back at the middle with a door outside to an outside laundry, this undercover outside loo, and then this big, open-sided shed area. Yeah, it wasn’t a dream house when we walked in, and myself and my partner had very different ideas. He thought we’d find somewhere that maybe needed a new kitchen. And he was really underwhelmed when we came to see this house. 

Before and after photos of the renovation project [SOURCE]

I’d actually contacted the estate agent the day it was listed. That was listed on the Thursday, I contacted them for the floor plan. I drew out possible extension ideas on the Friday. We saw it on the Saturday, I loved it. He was underwhelmed. We put in the offer on the Sunday, accepted on the Monday, and then I signed up to HOME Method on Tuesday. So coming to the home open, I knew that this was going to be something that we could make ours, and that ticked so many of the boxes, and it was in a decent price bracket as well, because we were looking in mid 2020 which was before prices started to shoot up in Perth. So we got lucky with timing in terms of the housing market when we bought as well.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I mean, I’m thinking it checks so many boxes in terms of that size of the site, the east to rear orientation, as you said, the pool’s already there. And you could see that that could work. And I love that you jumped through those hoops of sort of figuring out, okay, what could we do with this? What’s a quick little feasibility test, and then hitting the ground running with HOME Method from the kickoff. So really, really fantastic explanation of that process, and really awesome to hear the detail of, I suppose, that searching and all of the moving parts that need to come together to find the right property. And not only that, but also then balancing that with your partner’s priorities as well, is always a really interesting exercise. So I love hearing more about that. 

Now, when you think back to that time before you began, so you joined HOME Method the day after you secured the property, what were you, I suppose, nervous about, or what were you thinking a renovation would involve? Like, where were you? You’re both medical specialists, so you’re outside of this industry completely. What were your impressions of what it was going to take? And obviously, sounds like they’re a little bit different in terms of your partner thinking that you were going to undertake a smaller project, and the renovation that you’ve done is quite a significant one. So if you think back to where you were at, can you talk through a little bit about that, to paint a picture, I suppose, of where you were? Because one thing I know that’s going to come out in our conversation is just how you’ve been amazing at how you’ve upskilled yourself, how you’ve applied your knowledge, how you’ve interrogated the process, how you’ve really been a champion for the future home that you had a vision of, the outcome that you’ve been able to create, how incredibly well it works for the site, for the orientation, for your lifestyle. And so I’m really curious, what was your standing start from, to then be able to navigate that through?

Sophie
Yeah, absolutely. So a few months before I discovered your podcast, my idea of renovating was that it’s terrifying. It’s a runaway train. You surrender all control. You have no control over how it turns out. You can’t get off because there’s no roof and you have to finish it, and you’re at the mercy of a team. They’ve got expertise. You don’t. Your hands are tied. You have to live with the fallout or the consequences, or you have to rectify mistakes, or you have to pay for it. So it was really intimidating, and it took a while going through your podcasts and listening to the way it was organised and structured. It felt empowering, and I felt actually, I think I can do this. And so signing up to HOME Method just broke everything down into a really sensible, logical, empowering, educational way of navigating the process, not to take over, not to dismiss the expertise of the team that you’re embracing, but to be able to work alongside them and pick the right people. Because ultimately, it’s my home, and I’ve got to live in it. And picking people who want the same outcome as you do, which is a lovely home for you to live in, I didn’t want to pick people who were going to use our home and our money to show off to their colleagues. And I think in some ways, medicine is similar, your home or your body, it’s the vessel in which you live your life. You want it to work for you and you want to understand its quirks and what goes wrong and use the right people to get the best outcome for you. So signing up to HOME Method really made complete sense and gave me the confidence to pick up really quite a significant project, which was a lot bigger than I would have backed myself in before, and much bigger than anything I’d done previously.

Fairly new swimming pool at the back [SOURCE]

Amelia Lee
I suppose, before we dive a little bit further into the design, so it was a two by one, two bedroom, one bathroom, one living, one kitchen, I imagine, or, as you said, 100 square metres with the external toilet, laundry and the shed, what have you created? What’s been the end result, in terms of just the physical, I suppose, layout of the house, so that people can see the scale of the project that you’ve undertaken?

Sophie
Sure. So now, we have a four bed, three bath, with a kitchen, living, dining extension at the back, with a new laundry and walk-through pantry. Where the old asbestos lean to outdoor toilet laundry was, we’ve created a master bedroom, bathroom, wardrobe on the downstairs level. And then upstairs, we’ve created a guest area. So it’s a large room, big storeroom, wardrobe, and an en suite upstairs. We kept pretty much all of the original house, so the living room and the dining room is now our living room and our office. Then we kept the two older bedrooms, which is another guest room or potential future kid room, and then our baby’s room. We extended the original bathroom, which was just tiny and you couldn’t wash your hair without banging your elbows on the wall and the glass. So we’ve extended that. 

From the front of the house, you can’t really tell that there’s a little upstairs area. So we live in WA, so we call it the mullet house. There’s mullets everywhere in WA. So it’s small at the front, and then it’s a big party at the back. We kept a lot of original features, original ceilings, windows, we kept the original front door, but we rebuilt the porch that it was in because there was some subsidence in that area. So we rebuilt the porch, and we put some side lights in so we’ve got lots of light coming in through the hallway, which was really dark and dingy with these really enclosed archways. We re-tiled, re-insulated, sealed windows. The benefit of living in the house for 15 months during the design process was we lived through seasons, temperature changes. We could see where the areas that were uncomfortable or frustrating, or money down the drain in terms of artificial heating, cooling, those sort of things, and just made the house functional, efficient, comfortable again. And living through light changes as well, and seeing what happens during winter and summer, and where are the comfortable, pleasant places to be at different times of year and have we factored that into the design in terms of where we want to hang out and relax?

Amelia Lee
Yeah, I love it. And it was very clear in your approach how important that natural light was for you, and the thermal performance and the comfort level in the home as well. And I mean, you can see how that’s been informed by living in houses that don’t perform well, and just how uncomfortable, and also how that can really monopolise your life overall. It’s not just your time in the home, but you go out of the home feeling just demoralised before the day begins, because it’s been freezing cold and the house has been dark, you haven’t had the opportunity of having a great start to the day, and then you come home to it again at the end of the day. So can you remember some of your other, I suppose, the most important things, or the things that you’re really targeting as you started working on that design and thinking through the process, and I think, as part of that, can we chat through the team that you pulled together and achieving those design, design outcomes that you were chasing?

Sophie
Absolutely. Going back to what you were talking about, I think living in a house that isn’t designed well thermally or from a light point of view, it just absolutely impacts your sense of well being at all times. And having lived in a house that was unpleasant from that point of view, I really made sure that that it wasn’t going to be the case here. So I think our design, I really wanted to focus on future proofing and flexibility, partly because, at times, we were going to have different families staying and we needed to make sure that we didn’t have to move people out and put people on a mattress under a desk in the study. And the future proofing flexibility as well, in terms of the rooms that our baby is in at the moment, she has the option of moving, depending on what our family unit ends up looking like. 

In terms of mobility, I think you do have to build for all eventualities in terms of your family unit. And something that we see in our jobs, we see people whose life changes drastically and have had to make significant changes to their home. So we have wide doorways. We have a bathroom that is very accessible, but it’s not a nursing home bathroom at the moment. But should we want to stay here for even longer than we’re planning, we have that option. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t going to be any wasted, redundant spaces in the home. And I remember listening to one of your podcasts where there was a family unit, and they were mapped out in terms of where they spent the majority of their time. And 80-85% of the dots were in a certain area, and then there’s very little use of space. But all of those spaces, they need building, they need insulating, painting, heating, cooling, furnishing. So there’s a lot of waste in home building, and especially for these sort of rooms that get used very infrequently, or very occasionally. And we didn’t want there to be redundant space in our home. So all of our spaces get used a lot. 

Before and after photos of their entry porch [SOURCE]

We both do a bit of work from home. We both do telehealth. So our office gets used a lot. Our front living room gets used by one of us, if we want to come and chill out whilst someone wants cooking dinner, or the TV’s on, or he’s got mates over, and I’ll go and hang out here. The bedrooms get used by visiting friends, family, people coming to stay. We love hosting, we love entertaining, we love having people over. So we don’t have a lot of redundant space, but we don’t feel like we have compromised on size at all, which that was really important. 

In terms of choosing our team, firstly, as soon as we got our offer accepted, I made moves to get all the right documentation in place, so that when I started approaching team members, I had a bundle of information that was valuable, but also would demonstrate that I was serious about my job and my role in this. So as soon as we settled, I’d arranged for somebody to come and do a proper site survey the following weekend. We’d arranged for somebody to come and get accurate floor plan measurements so that we could get a one-to-one documentation, because the floor plan from the estate agent was slightly inaccurate, and I was trying to draw to size, and I was like, “Why isn’t this adding up? There’s a wall missing.” And so we got all that done and worked on the design brief, which I use the HOME Method template for. So when it came to approaching architects, builders, I would be able to send them an email, tell them about us, tell them about the work I’d done so far, present them with some documentation and some ideas, and put it in their court to see what response I would get. And I definitely had some concerns about the industry in general, because bad news travels fast, and you hear lots of horror stories from people about wasted money or plans that are way over budget, and how do I avoid that? 

And I was a bit concerned about the potential for gender bias in this industry as well, as a younger female with very little experience in this industry approaching predominantly a male dominated area. And I think gender bias does exist. I think it’s being acknowledged more, and I think there are some fantastic people in the industry that are improving that, and you’re one of them. But it was a worry that I had. So definitely, I had my radar on for that when I was getting responses from people. 

I did approach an architect, I was asked, why do you want an architect if you know exactly what you want? And I think there’s so much more that you get out of having a right architect on board than simply, ‘Here’s a really fancy, expensive design.’ And they were very amenable to working with me and not taking over the design aspect. And I know one of your pieces of advice was if you’re using design professionals, don’t tell them what to do, let them do their design. And I completely ignored that because I knew exactly what I wanted. But I don’t have the expertise in terms of the structure, combining old roofs and new roofs, and how do you get those lines right? And they were liaising. They had lots of experience in this area. They knew the town planners, they knew Council. They were able to liaise from that point of view. The time involved in painstaking construction drawing and being really meticulous in those details, it’s just not time that I had. 

And our architect was a fixed fee architect who was able to give us a breakdown of the costs and what each payment represented in terms of stages of the support and the input and the documentation. So it was really clear, transparent, and I knew exactly what we were signing up for when we engaged an architect, as opposed to a lot of other horror stories where it’s a percentage of the build, and that can just become an infinite number. And our architect was very, very team focused as well, and liked the fact that I’d use that team word so much, and they were fantastic. And we’re still in touch year and a half after moving in. In terms of how I went about choosing builders, I knew that I wanted to have a builder on board early during the design process as another person with expertise to bring into the recipe for our home. Not only that, but then engaging them meant that we had the ability to pay for their time and expertise, and also be part of their forecasting in terms of allocation of their time when we were ready to build. So we were in their timeline, and they’d kept our project free and available to start as soon as our building permit had been issued. The process that I went down to choose a builder was fairly detailed. There’s several that I’d followed or seen houses around the area with the placards outside, so followed them and looked at their projects. Narrowed it down to about five or six builders that I interviewed on site. So they came around, had a chat, and I had my A3 piece of graph paper with my crayon drawing of what I thought I’d want to build, our design brief, and just brought them round to get a feel of is this somebody that I can work with? Is this somebody that I would want in my home? Do you just get a good, I guess to use the medical analogy, if they’ve got a good bedside manner, and do I trust them? 

Then there was one builder who I just knew was going to be really irritating, just kept talking over me and wasn’t going to listen. There was another builder who came, looked at our design brief, and my A3 piece of crayon graph paper drawing, and said, “I think we can build this for x number of dollars.” And I just remember thinking, thanks to you, I know what you’ve just told me is complete nonsense. I know that you cannot say that at all. But it’s very tempting because that’s a nice number.

Upstairs guest bathroom with skylights [SOURCE]

Amelia Lee
It feels like certainty, doesn’t it?

Sophie
Yeah.

Amelia Lee
At that point when you’re standing there and all you’ve got is that piece of paper with your sketch on it, and you’re at the beginning of your process, and you’re desperate to hang on to some sort of certainty to make then the ability to move forward that, when a builder does do that, it feels like it offers it up. But it’s so good that you had your eyes open to the fact that that’s actually not going to be a helpful way to proceed.

Sophie
Yeah. The builder we ended up choosing came around, we had a lovely chat, was really genuine, really pleasant. Had lots of experience, lots of expertise. Had worked on a lot of older houses at some time in the UK as well. I’d found this particular builder through a painter that I’d used already. I’d used this painter in my apartment, and I’d followed him on Instagram, and he posted a video of painting up older style Federation house and had tagged the builder in it. So that’s how I found this particular builder. So I actually contacted the painter as well to get a trades professional perspective of what he’s like to work for as a builder. And he said, “He’s really organised. His timeline forecasting is really reliable. So I like working for him because I can reliably fit other jobs around, and I’m not messed around in terms of delays. He pays me on time.” All of those aspects. And then I contacted, our builder had given us two contacts of projects that they completed. So I’d contacted those owners, and actually went to the houses and had a look around, saw the quality of work, had a chat with the owners about what was your experience like with them. Were there any issues, conflicts? How did the project go?  

And that all seemed really obvious to me, but it’s amazing how many people don’t do that, and how many people are really surprised that I did that. And, I think, you’re trusting this person, this professional with a huge amount of money, which equates to many years of your working life, to produce what you’re going to be living in. Of course, you want to do your due diligence, and that’s such an important aspect of it. So I was really glad that I did all of that, because our builder was fantastic. Our build project was kind of boring. It was very uneventful. Once we started, it just happened. And again, we’re still in touch with our team, which is really lovely.

Amelia Lee
Yeah, it’s all music to my ears, Sophie, because in terms of the decisions that you made, that research that you did, and as you said, because of the way you’ve navigated design and set yourself up, and the relationship that you have with the builder, and then we’ll dive into some of the more construction prep that you did, but construction should just be a beautiful process of execution. But you’re just then dealing with the hiccups and hurdles that inevitably come up because it’s a custom build, but that it’s not a ride that you have to brace yourself into like some emotional roller coaster. 

So it’s absolutely awesome to hear you take us through that in detail, because I know that a lot of listeners will, well, if they’ve been around Undercover Architect for a long time, they’ll know that those are definitely the kinds of checks that I suggest and recommend. But it is, it is still unusual for the wider public to not dive into that, which is odd given the level of investment that it is, and it’s a home, and that it’s something that is also an asset, and that kind of stuff. So I love that you took us through that and shared your experience, and joining the dots of the painter on social media, and it’s a really great insight to help people find other ways to look for the right people to work with.

RESOURCES

Sophie’s Project Instagram Account ‘Californian Reloved’ >>> https://www.instagram.com/californian_reloved/ 

Access the support and guidance you need (like Sophie did) to be confident and empowered when renovating and building your family home inside my flagship online program, HOME METHOD >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/the-home-method/

Learn more about how to interview and select the right builder with the Choose Your Builder mini-course >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/courses/choose-your-builder 

Access my free online workshop “Your Project Plan” >>> https://undercoverarchitect.com/projectplan