NSW index
Every council and suburb page we have in NSW, listed by region
Thirty-two council pages and five suburb pages, grouped the way Sydney is actually described rather than alphabetically, so you can find the one that covers your address at a glance.
This is the index. Find your council, or the suburb page if there is one, and everything worth saying about the housing, the access and the plastering work that comes up most in that area sits on it. The regions below are the ordinary ones people use for Sydney, not administrative boundaries.
If you are not certain which council you are in, the suburbs printed beside each name will usually settle it. Every council area has far more suburbs than the two or three shown, so a name you cannot see on this page is not a name we do not cover.
- 32 council pages
- 5 suburb pages
- Grouped by region
Every area page in one place
Thirty-seven pages, grouped by region, with the larger suburbs shown beside each name.
Written area by area
Each page describes that area's buildings and access, not the same paragraph with a new name in it.
Routed to the right work
Every area page points at the services that come up most in that part of Sydney.
Licensed in NSW
NSW contractor licence 244708C, working across Greater Sydney and the councils around it.
Eastern Sydney
The eastern suburbs, council by council
Three councils take in the coast and the harbour side east of the city. Walk-up flats from the sixties over apartments and shop-top units, older semis and houses behind them, and salt air working on everything near the water.
Lower north shore
Across the lower north shore
Small council areas packed close together, swinging between apartment towers around the stations and peninsula streets of older houses a few minutes away. Two suburbs on this side of the harbour carry a page of their own as well.
Upper north shore and beaches
Up the north shore and along the beaches
Bigger council areas, bigger blocks and longer drives between jobs. Ku-ring-gai and Hornsby take in a lot of bush edge and split-level housing, and the Northern Beaches runs the full length of the peninsula from Manly up to Palm Beach.
Inner west and Ryde
The inner west and across to Ryde
Terraces, semis and Federation cottages sitting against newer apartment stock along the river and the rail line. This is the part of Sydney where you are least able to guess what is behind the paint before you open it up.
Western Sydney
Through the western suburbs
Post-war brick and tile through the middle ring, large newer estates on the growth edge, and a run of unit stock around Parramatta and the Metro stations. Large council areas, and mostly straightforward access once you are on the street.
South west Sydney
South west, from Bankstown out to Camden
The widest spread of building ages in one run: fifties and sixties fibro and brick around Bankstown, seventies and eighties estates through Liverpool and Campbelltown, and new release housing out around Oran Park and Gregory Hills.
Southern Sydney and the Shire
Southern Sydney and down through the Shire
Rockdale, Kogarah and Hurstville carry a lot of walk-up flats and newer towers, while the Shire runs from Cronulla back through Miranda to Menai and Engadine, with houses on sloping blocks and plenty of closed-in decks underneath them.
Outer west and the mountains
The outer west, the Hawkesbury and the mountains
The far edge of the coverage, and the part where travel genuinely changes how a job is staged rather than just how long the drive is. Weatherboard and fibro cottages up the mountains, farmhouses and outbuildings across the Hawkesbury, and big new estates around Penrith.
About the grouping
How these eight groupings were drawn
Sydney has no official regions, so any grouping is a judgement call. These follow the harbour, the rail lines and the way people describe where they live, and a few of them are worth explaining.
- The harbour splits the first two groups. What sits east of the city and what sits immediately north of the bridge have almost nothing in common in housing or in access, so they are never grouped together here.
- Ryde is listed with the inner west rather than the north shore. It is on the wrong side of the river for that, but its unit stock and its renovation patterns read far closer to Canada Bay and Burwood than to Ku-ring-gai.
- Canterbury-Bankstown appears under south west rather than inner west. The council reaches a long way in both directions, and its southern half has much more in common with Fairfield and Liverpool than with Marrickville.
- Bayside straddles the airport and is grouped south with Georges River and the Shire, because Rockdale, Arncliffe and Brighton-le-Sands sit closer to Kogarah in age and building type than to the eastern beaches.
- The last group is the only one drawn by distance instead of housing. Penrith, the Hawkesbury, the Blue Mountains and Wollondilly are nothing like each other to work in. What they share is the drive.
Names without a page
Four Sydney regions people ask for by name
These four get used constantly and none of them is a council area, so none of them has a page. The councils listed above are where the useful detail sits. What each name usually means for plaster is worth knowing anyway.
Sydney CBD
Almost entirely commercial tenancies, towers and shop-top apartments. Work in the city is defined by the building rather than the room: dock bookings, after-hours access, rated and acoustic systems, and grid ceilings that have to come apart again for the trades above them.
Eastern Suburbs
Bondi through Coogee to Maroubra, and around to Double Bay and Vaucluse. Interwar and sixties walk-up flats over the top of older semis and houses, salt air on everything near the water, and parking that shapes the day. Waverley, Randwick and Woollahra carry it between them.
North Shore
Anything from Milsons Point up to Wahroonga answers to the name. Lower down it is towers and older houses on small blocks; further up it is larger houses, bush edge, split levels and raked ceilings. Several council pages, from North Sydney to Hornsby, cover it.
Western Sydney
The largest of the four and the least uniform. Post-war brick and tile through the middle ring, apartment stock around Parramatta, and new estates out past Rooty Hill and Marsden Park. Several council pages sit under the one name.
If your suburb is not printed beside a council
Only two or three suburbs are shown against each council, and most of these areas have twenty or more. A suburb missing from this page means it did not fit on the line, not that it sits outside the coverage.
If you are not sure which council you are in, pick the one whose listed suburbs are nearest to you and read that page. It will be close enough to be useful, and the coverage page explains how the layers fit together if you want the short version first.
Index questions
Questions about this list
Mostly about how to read it, and what sits behind each name.
Why is this organised by council rather than by suburb?
Because a council area predicts the things that change a plastering job. Housing age, whether it is mostly houses or mostly units, parking and permit rules, and how much strata work there is in the area all track council boundaries reasonably well.
Thirty-seven pages written around those patterns say something real. Six hundred suburb pages saying the same thing with a different name at the top would not, and they would be harder to read as well.
How do I work out which council my suburb is in?
Look for a suburb you recognise near you in the lists above. Neighbouring suburbs are almost always in the same council area, and the region headings narrow it to a handful of options before you start.
If it is still not obvious, it does not matter much. Read the council page that sounds closest to your street, or just ring and say the suburb. The council name changes nothing about how the work is quoted.
What is on a council page that is not on a service page?
A service page explains one kind of work: how it is assessed, what it involves and what moves the price. A council page explains what that area's buildings are actually like, which of those jobs come up most there, and what the access and parking mean for scheduling.
So the two are read together. Find the area page for where you are, then follow it through to the service page for the work itself.
Do the postcodes on a council page limit what you cover?
No. The postcodes are there so you can confirm you are in the right area, not as a boundary. Postcodes and council areas do not line up neatly anywhere in Sydney, and several of them straddle two councils.
Take them as a check on which page you are reading, not as a list of where work is accepted.
Which of these areas take the longest to reach?
The outer edges: the upper Blue Mountains, the far side of the Hawkesbury, and the southern end of Wollondilly around Bargo and Buxton. The Northern Beaches is not far in kilometres and can be slow in traffic.
None of that rules a job out. It changes how the visits are grouped, because a repair needing three coats needs three trips, and those get planned together rather than spread across a fortnight.
Can one quote cover several of these areas?
Yes, and that is normal for anyone managing more than one property. A builder with two sites, an agent with a portfolio, or a strata manager with buildings in three council areas gets one scope and one set of paperwork rather than a separate arrangement for each address.
That work is described on the strata and property maintenance page, which covers how a job gets reported, approved and invoiced when the person who sees the damage is not the person who pays for it.
Found your area
Send the address and a photo of what needs doing
Once we know the suburb and can see the wall or the ceiling, we can tell you what the job is, how it would be staged from here and what the plastering part is likely to cost.