North Parramatta is changing quickly at the edges and holding still in the middle. Apartment buildings have gone up close to the Parramatta CBD boundary while the residential streets further out still carry Federation and interwar cottages, and the shutter work reflects that split almost exactly.
We cover North Parramatta in the 2151 postcode, from the Church Street end north through the residential streets to the Northmead and Oatlands boundaries. Westmead, Telopea and the Parramatta CBD are all on the same run.
Older cottages and newer apartments fail in different ways, but they share a climate. Parramatta sits well inland and summer temperatures here stay consistently above the coastal average, which puts every unit under thermal load.
If you own one of the older homes here, resist the urge to have a shutter cut to the size printed on a window schedule. Measure the opening at the head, at the middle and at the sill, because on a house of that age those three figures are rarely the same. Almost every premature failure we see on an older North Parramatta home traces back to a unit that was fitted to a measurement rather than to the opening it had to sit in. The same applies to a replacement on an apartment balcony, where the opening was built square but the balustrade and the soffit often leave less room than the drawings suggest.
