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Elise Weavers is days away from finishing her third renovation: a single fronted Melbourne terrace on 370 square metres, with a heritage facade at the street and a light filled modern extension behind it. She has moved in, the engagement party has been hosted, and all that is left is a fence, a coat of paint and some planting.
On the podcast this week, Elise sat down with Rebeka to unpick the question she gets asked most: with material prices and building costs still climbing, how do you keep a renovation on budget without ending up with a cheap looking result?
Her answer comes down to three levers. Size. Materials. Labour.
Lever one: every square metre you build costs you
The first place Elise looks is the footprint itself. More square metres equals more dollars: it is purely a numbers game. The goal is a home that feels generous, not a home that is maximum house on the block.
That discipline showed up in the floor plan. Elise and Sam worked through at least eight versions before they landed on the one they built, debating questions like whether to build out to the boundary on both sides. An extra ten square metres sounds tempting, but it adds thousands, changes how you access the backyard, complicates maintenance, and can even dictate your construction sequence: build yourself out of access and suddenly the landscaping has to happen first.
The trick is making a smaller footprint feel bigger through design. In Elise’s home, tall raked ceilings in the living and dining areas do that work, and the floor plan uses one of Rebeka’s favourite tools: compression and release. You move through the lower, cosier original rooms of the terrace, then the house opens into a big, bright back room. The contrast is what makes the space feel generous.
Lever two: materials, chosen for how you use them
Here is the mistake Elise sees people make: assuming that controlling material costs means picking the cheapest product. It does not. It means choosing cost effective products, then being smart about how you use them, what the wastage is, and what return they give you.
Three examples from her build:
Cladding. Sam is a carpenter, so the couple chose James Hardie Stria Cladding in a fine
texture, laid in a vertical profile that contrasts beautifully with the original horizontal weatherboards. It ticked the fire rating box for building on the boundary, kept the wall profile slimmer than brick or concrete would have, and, crucially, Sam could install it himself rather than bringing in another trade.
Stone. Elise spent more on her kitchen stone than she originally planned, then made it earn its keep. She laid out the slab use herself, checked it back with the stonemason, and squeezed every last centimetre out of it: the offcuts became a dining table, bedside tables and a coffee table. That is not an expensive benchtop, that is five pieces of furniture from one slab.
The kitchen. A laminate polytech kitchen instead of real timber. Because polytech is a prefinished board it is actually more durable than timber you paint and stain yourself, and it freed up budget for the finishes that matter most.
None of this reads as cheap in the finished home, because it is not. It is a balance of a few beautiful, more expensive finishes against smart, durable, affordable ones.
Lever three: labour, matched to your team
The third lever is the one most people never think to pull: design the build around the people doing the work.
Elise and Sam run every structural and design decision through a simple filter. Is this the most efficient way to build it? Is Sam comfortable with the engineering detail? What can be prefabricated? Trusses and wall frames arrive premade, get stood up, nailed down and topped with trusses, and you have a house shape in a day instead of a week of stick building, with less waste as a bonus.
The same thinking applies if you are hiring your team. Some builders are essentially site managers who coordinate trades. Others, like Sam on this project, are builder carpenters who coordinate and swing the hammer. Neither is wrong, but knowing which one you have changes which materials and methods will save you money. Choosing cladding over brickwork, for example, meant no extra footings, no messy wet trade, and one carpenter carrying the envelope from frame to finish.
The mullet that works
Someone once described this style of renovation to Rebeka as a mullet: traditional at the front, party out the back. Elise will happily take it. The period facade stays pretty at the street, and the modern extension behind it delivers the functional floor plan her family actually lives in.
What makes her builds so satisfying to watch is not luck. It is a project manager and a builder making hundreds of deliberate trade offs between cost, livability and return, then executing them with real discipline.
If you are planning your own renovation and want to build that same decision making muscle, this episode is a masterclass. Listen to the full conversation with Elise Weavers on Building with BuildHer, Season 8, Episode 16, “Size, Materials, Labour,” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
Ready to run your project like a BuildHer? Come and see what DevelopHer can do for you, or book a call with me or one of our team and let’s look at your numbers together.
