About Grandville Renovations

How we work

We take on renovation and building work across the areas listed below. Across inner and greater Victoria, north to Craigieburn, west to Bacchus Marsh, south-west to Geelong and the Bellarine, and south-east across the Mornington Peninsula.

Victoria is not one building market. A weatherboard cottage in Yarraville with a heritage overlay, a slab-on-ground estate house in Tarneit on reactive clay, and a timber home on a steep bushfire-rated block in Olinda are three different jobs even when the brief is the same. The cottage has restricted access, a subfloor that has been moving for a century, and a council with a view on anything visible from the street. The estate house has none of those problems and a different one instead, which is ground that swells and shrinks with the seasons. The block in the hills brings bushfire construction requirements into the specification before anyone talks about finishes. Quoting all three the same way is how projects go wrong, and it is the reason our first conversation is longer than most.

So before we quote, we check what actually applies to your property. The zone, the overlays, the soil, the council. That takes time up front and it occasionally produces an answer nobody wanted, which is that the job as described will not get approval in the form it was imagined. We would rather deliver that news before a deposit than after a design. The alternative is the pattern every homeowner has heard about from someone, where a fixed price turns out to have been an estimate, and the variations start arriving once the walls are open. Most of those variations were knowable at the start. They were simply not checked.

What you can expect

• Written scope before any money changes hands
• Fixed-price quote after the property check
• Certificates and documentation handed over at completion

How we work in writing

We work to written scope rather than verbal agreement, and the scope says what is excluded as clearly as what is included. Where an amount is an allowance rather than a price, it is labelled as one, so you can see which parts of a quote are firm and which will move once selections are made. Licensed work is done by the licensed trade and the certificate comes to you, not into a filing cabinet. At completion you get the documentation, because a waterproofing certificate or a compliance certificate is worth something at sale and nothing if nobody can find it. We also put the programme in writing, including the points where the job stops for an inspection, because those waits are part of the timeline and leaving them out makes every schedule look better than it is. If something slips you will hear it from us rather than notice it. That is a low bar in most industries and an unusually rare one in this one.