Despite the fact that Townsville City Council only approved our house raise and restump on the 14th of February (see Building Permit has been Approved article) the contractor will be starting the lift in only two weeks time! We’ll have to be out of the house for a week, and we don’t have a place to stay yet, but this means that we should have about a month in the house after it has been lifted before the new baby is born (April 14th if it’s on schedule).

We have been really impressed with the contractor doing the raise and restump. The company is Northern House Raising and is run by Gary Robertson. He seems to be great guy and has been helping us to move along really quickly. Unfortunately we have found that we were given some pretty crappy advise from the previous contractors that we were talking to (see Bad Townsville Contactors… article) so now we are paying for it in extra time and some costs. Gary and his builders have already saved us about $4000.00 by changing how our exterior walls on the bottom of the house will be constructed, which will be good, but more on that later.

Like pretty much every other builder and contractor in Townsville they don’t have a web-site but here are the other details for Northern House Raising if you are looking for someone to do your Raise and Restump in Townsville:

NHR PTY LTD
Northern House Raising
Director: Gary Robertson
46 Grove Crescent
Kirwin, QLD
4817

Office Ph/Fax: (07) 4723 8646
Mobile: 0409 074 324

I’ll be giving updates and hopefully posting photos of the actual process of lifting the house, but from everything I have seen of Gary so far I would definitely recommend him.

(Please note that I do not get any benefit from recommending him, but you could always mention where you heard about him from.)