This year Townsville has seen about 2500 new homes built and has a population growth forcast at around 3500 people.
In the next 20 years the Townsville & Thuringowa population is expected to double from the current 140,000 to aroun 280,000 residence.
With a growth that fast I can only expect it to get even more difficult to find tradespeople to work on renovations as they will almost always prefer to work on new homes and developements over renovations…
I was quite suprised when I looked over at the news stand last week and saw a picture of my street with the headline “The Street that Castletown Bought” plaster on the front page! I was tempted to buy a half dozen copies and send them to friends with our house circled.
So that’s why we sold our house. We hadn’t planned to at all, for us it was meant to be a long term investment. But the shopping centre next door wanted room for a new car park, and we were in the way.
Tamara and I often joke that we should have put in the contract that they had to build a Starbucks or Tim Hortons where our old place was/is. That way we could take our son there and tell him “See right next to the espresso machine, that was where you took your first steps..”.
But instead there will probably be a slab of concrete where our house once stood…
I heard rumors that there were plans up of the house in the management office at the shopping centre, so I hope to pop over there next week and check them out. If I can I will take some photos and stick them on here for you. I’ll even try to mark off where our house currently stands.
(update: I found the story on the Townsville Bulletin site, which you can read here: Townsville Bulletin: Street that Castletown bought)
Tamara and I have been trying to work out a budget for our renovation. With the house lifting we have so far got 4 different quotes. They have a variation of about 35% and they all seem to cover the exact same things!
Raising and Restumping our house will, we hope, be the largest expense for our renovation. After that expense the next biggest will most likely be our deck and actually enclosing and building under the lifted house.
I have found that there is no company that will give us an exact price for lifting the house. They will usually give us some estimates but it’s normally accompanied with the statement “There could be some variation in that depending on …”.
Because of that it is quite hard to budget for the steps that we need to take in our renovation after lifting. We need to start booking people now as the contractors are so busy in Townsville, but it’s hard to know how many steps ahead to book since we don’t actually know how much money we will have to work with.
I read a good article about budgeting finances and time for renovations. You can read about it here:
I just got off the phone with the house lifting people today and the plan that I had drawn up for under our house has to go through some pretty major revisions.
In the original plan I had pushed the lower level out by about a metre to accommodate a slightly larger garage. Well it turns out that if we want to do that we will be adding about four months to the approval process because we will need to not only apply to the Townsville City Council, but also to Townsville Planning, which processes it seperate from the Townsville City Council.
My original plan brought the left side of the house closer to the boundary line, and also changed the facade of the house, which is why it would require the additional approval. So I have had to modify the plans to keep it all under the original roof line, which pretty much removes all of the storage from the sides of the garage.