Home Renovations · Five Dock
Home renovations in Five Dock, done properly.
Complete home renovations for Five Dock homeowners by a licensed builder. A typical full transformation runs $180,000 to $450,000, itemised quote, honest programme, one builder from concept to handover.
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Complete transformations
More than cosmetic updates.
A home renovation is an opportunity to completely redefine how you live. Strava Group delivers high end home renovations across Five Dock and the surrounding bayside suburbs, transforming established homes into refined, contemporary residences, managed as complete projects from concept through to completion.
Rather than renovating room by room, we approach each Five Dock project as a unified transformation: layout reconfigurations, designer kitchens, luxury bathrooms, flooring, lighting, windows and street presence, all working together. The result is a home that feels intentional, balanced and built to a higher standard.
On most Five Dock homes, Federation or Italian era brick, the biggest single gain is not the kitchen. It is the wall between the kitchen and the living room, and where the light lands once it is gone.
Quick Answer
Ground floor renovation work runs $2,500 to $4,500 per square metre, with roughly $30,000 in preliminaries (design, engineering and council approvals, plus site set-up) on top. A full internal renovation of a typical Five Dock home generally falls between $180,000 and $450,000, with period detail work adding to that on Federation homes. Structural changes, wet areas and the age of the existing services move the figure most.
Renovating in Five Dock
What shapes a renovation in Five Dock.
Five Dock is one of the tightest held house markets in the inner west, Federation streets and solid brick from the suburb’s Italian decades. Here is what shapes a project locally.
Council
City of Canada Bay
Five Dock sits within the City of Canada Bay, not Inner West Council as people often assume. Internal renovations that keep the structure and footprint often need no approval at all under Exempt Development. On the conservation streets, anything visible from the street generally needs a full Development Application, and we confirm the pathway for your property before quoting.
Housing
Federation homes and Italian era brick
Five Dock is Federation and California Bungalow through the older streets, with solid post war brick built through the suburb’s Italian decades: good bones everywhere, layouts from another time. Closed kitchens, formal rooms, dark hallways. Exactly the stock where a considered renovation transforms daily life while the character stays.
Structure
A century of settlement behind the linings
Federation era framing has usually seen a hundred years of movement, previous renovations and undocumented alterations. We check and rectify the structure before anything goes back on, tie new work properly to old, and detail every junction so the finished walls stay flat and crack free.
Layout
Period front, contemporary back
The renovation that works in Five Dock keeps the facade the street loves and opens the rear of the house into contemporary family living flowing to the yard. Five Dock’s flat grid blocks make the building side of that simpler than the harbourside streets nearby, and most of the walls involved are structural. We engineer them out properly.
Services
Wiring and plumbing from another era
Century old homes frequently carry generations of patched wiring, galvanised plumbing and undersized switchboards. A full renovation is the one moment these can be replaced without ripping open finished rooms, and we assess them up front rather than mid build.
Value
A suburb worth reinvesting in
With the village strip, the Bay Run around the corner and the new Metro, Five Dock values support serious renovation spend, and a well renovated period home is the most sought after product in a suburb where families hold their homes for generations. A complete transformation typically costs far less than trading up once stamp duty and agent fees are counted.
Thinking bigger than a renovation? We also build second storey additions in Five Dock and home extensions in Five Dock, and staging them alongside a renovation costs less than doing them years apart.
Start here
Tell us about your Five Dock home.
No sales pitch, no obligation. Here is exactly what happens when you enquire:
One at a time, takes about two minutes, so the first conversation is about your project rather than the basics.
The Strava standard
How we build differently.
We build for longevity. That sounds like a slogan until you see where it costs us money. On every Five Dock renovation we run:
The existing structure gets rectified, not covered
Plenty of renovations put new gyprock over old problems and hope for the best. We do a full screw off and re-brace the whole house, tying new and existing structure together so the frame moves as one and future cracking is designed out, not painted over.
Furring channels for a dead flat finish
We install furring channels throughout, creating a perfectly level plane for the new linings regardless of what the old frame is doing behind them. Flat on handover day, still flat in raking afternoon light years later.
Waterproofing is a documented hold point
Wet areas are inspected and photographed before a single tile goes on, to AS 3740.
Blocking installed at frame stage
Extra noggins and fixings go in where vanities, TVs, handrails and shower screens will hang later, not chased in afterwards.
Every new-to-existing junction properly detailed
This is where most renovations crack. It is almost always a detailing shortcut, not settlement. Ours get a proper flashing and movement detail.
Everything photographed before it is covered
You receive the record at handover, so in ten years you know exactly what is behind your walls.
Honest numbers
What a renovation costs in Five Dock.
Most builders will not put numbers on a website. We will, because the alternative is wasting your time and ours across three meetings before anyone mentions a figure.
| Item | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Full internal renovation, typical Five Dock home | $180k–$450k |
| Ground floor renovation work | $2,500–$4,500 /m² |
| Work at first floor level | $3,500–$5,500 /m² |
| Preliminaries, on top of build cost | approx. $30,000 |
Federation homes reward care and punish shortcuts, and renovating one properly costs more per square metre than a seventies project home. Matching period joinery, plaster detail and roof junctions takes trade skill, and it is exactly the work we enjoy most. Tight side access near the semis can add to preliminaries, priced up front rather than discovered mid build, though Five Dock’s flat grid keeps most sites straightforward.
How many of the walls you want gone are structural is usually the largest single factor, followed by the number of wet areas, since a bathroom carries more trades per square metre than any other room in the house. Century old homes frequently need full rewiring and replumbing, priced up front rather than discovered mid build.
Every project is quoted properly after a site inspection. These ranges are here so you can decide whether it is worth a conversation.
Good to know
Five Dock renovation questions.
Rated 5.0 on Google.
We had Strava Group complete major renovation works on our property and were blown away with the quality. The attention to detail and overall finish were amazing.
Great communication, honest work, easy to work with, highly recommend to work with for any new build/renovations. If you are looking to get work done without worrying about shortcuts Strava Group is builder to use.
I highly recommend Strava Group to everyone great workmanship, reliable service, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.
I couldn't be happier with the work from Strava Group. From the beginning, Stav and the team was friendly, honest, and super easy to deal with.
We engaged Strava Group for a home extension and renovation. We are incredibly happy with the service and the results we achieved. From day one Stav and team where always willing to help with any issues we had and we loved that the main focus was as quality and longevity. Highly recommended
Had a great experience with Strava Group. The team was easy to deal with, super professional, and kept me in the loop the whole way through. They really listened to what I wanted and made the whole process feel smooth and stress-free.
Aloona T.
Google review
Orom Gabriel
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Jonathan
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Clara Shabow
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Jonathan Jajo
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Eli Kosso
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Renovate your Five Dock home properly.
Ready to transform how your home works?
Tell us about your property and what you want to change. We respond within 24 to 48 business hours with honest advice and real numbers, no cost, no obligation.
More in Five Dock
Other services in Five Dock
Each page covers the local council, the homes we see in Five Dock and what that kind of project typically costs.