Carpenter Inner West Sydney | Renovation & Extension Framing
Inner West carpentry is renovation carpentry. The suburbs were built out a century ago, so almost every job is an addition to, or a reworking of, a house that already exists — a rear extension, an upper floor, or a ground floor opened up.
Jirah Carpentry handles the structural carpentry side of that work: new floor, wall and roof framing tied into old buildings, set out from your architect's drawings and framed to the engineer's detail.
For the Sydney-wide picture of how we work, read our Sydney carpenter page, or see every area we cover on service areas.
Old housing on tight blocks
The Inner West building stock is old and it is tight — attached and closely spaced homes on narrow frontages with small rear yards. Almost none of it was built to the tolerances a modern extension assumes.
What that means in practice is that setout cannot be taken from the drawings alone. Walls are not plumb, floors are not level, and a rear wall is rarely square to the side boundary. We measure what is actually there first, then work out how the new framing meets it — because the alternative is a new addition that looks correct on paper and visibly wrong where the two buildings join.
Heritage character is common through these suburbs, and where the approval places conditions on the work we frame to what has been approved and documented. We are carpenters, not consultants, so anything approval-related sits with your architect or certifier.
No driveway, no crane, no room to stack
Inner West sites are the most physically constrained we work on. Many properties have no off-street parking at all. Access to the rear can be a hallway or a shared side lane, and there is often nowhere to stack a full timber order.
That changes how a job is planned rather than how it is built. Deliveries get staged so material arrives close to when it is fixed. Cutting is set up where it does not block the only route through. And the sequence is worked out with the other trades early, because on a site this size two crews cannot occupy the same space.
We are upfront that this style of work takes longer per square metre than a greenfield frame. Anyone quoting an Inner West extension on suburban timeframes has not accounted for the site.
What we're asked to frame here
The project types we take on across the Inner West:
New Builds — Houses
Full house frames on the rebuild and infill sites that do come up, framed with neighbours on both boundaries.
Duplex Framing
Dual-occupancy framing on the less constrained blocks toward the outer edge of the region.
Granny Flat Framing
Secondary dwellings where the block allows it, framed with materials carried in rather than driven in.
Renovations & Extensions
The core of our Inner West work — rear additions, opened-up ground floors and new framing meeting original structure.
Detailed drawings are the norm, and that helps
More Inner West work is architect-documented than anywhere else we operate, and that is genuinely easier to build. A properly detailed set tells us how the junction between old and new is meant to resolve, which is exactly the part of an extension that goes wrong when it is left to be worked out on site.
We price from the architectural and engineering sets together. Where a detail cannot be built as drawn given what is actually on site, we raise it before we frame it and put the options in front of you and the designer.
The Inner West within our Sydney coverage
We are based in Western Sydney and travel in for this work, which we are open about: Inner West jobs need to be worth the run, so we tend to take on extensions and additions rather than very small pieces of carpentry.
Adjoining regions we cover include Canterbury-Bankstown, St George, the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore. For the trade detail, read residential carpentry and timber framing Sydney. Everywhere we work is listed on service areas, with the overview on our Sydney carpenter page.
Where our work starts and stops
Our scope on an Inner West job is the structural carpentry: floor framing, wall framing, roof framing, beams, posts and lintels, bracing and tie-down, built to the engineer's sizes and fixing details. Deck and pergola structure sits in the same bracket.
We do not take on joinery, cabinetry or finishing carpentry, and we do not act as the builder on a renovation. On architect-run Inner West projects there is usually a builder coordinating trades, and our part is to deliver a frame that everything after it can be built off accurately.
We also do not give advice on approvals, heritage conditions or engineering. Where the documentation specifies something, we build to it; where it cannot be built as drawn given what is on site, we raise it with you and the designer rather than improvising.
Extending An Inner West Home?
Send the architect's set through and we'll price the framing scope properly.