Building Permit has been Approved!

I just got an e-mail from the Townsville City Council and I called them on the phone to confirm it, but we have been given approval for all of our plans! So that is very exciting news given that some people told us it would take up to three months for approval to be granted.

The council won’t release the permit for enclosing and building under until we have provided them with an insurance certificate. Since we don’t even have any quotes yet for enclosing and building under the house we don’t have a builder selected yet.

Thankfully it is a separate permit for enclosing and building than it is for raising and restumping the house. Because of that our house lifter should be able to start soon (he previously told us within about three weeks of being approved). That’s pretty exciting because it should mean that we will get that part done quite a bit before the baby is due, rather than a week before, which is what we had originally feared…

Mystery of the Dead Grass – Solved…

Just before the previous owners sold their house they put new turn / sod down in the back yard. We have been quite diligent in watering the lawn but this one patch just died, and no amount of watering helped. The patch seemed to have very square corners a fairly straight edges, so I thought that maybe that was where the put all the turn when they bought it and it had crushed the grass, or something like that. I even asked the neighbour and he couldn’t remember anything ever being there, and he couldn’t think of anything.

So last weekend we went out to purchase some grass seed and fertilizer. We found out that the kind of grass that we have, buffalo grass, can’t be planted with seeds, you need to get actual turf / sod and lay it because it’s a “creeping” grass, or something like that. All the places that sold turf were closed on the weekends so instead I purchased a pitch fork so that I could try aerating that part of the lawn and maybe apply some of the fertilizer that I already had. When I finally went to poke the holes in the ground I wound up and “twang“, I hit something very hard. I tried again somewhere else thinking that it was a rock and again, “twang“, the same thing happened.

That’s when I started to poke around the turf more carefully and I discovered a pattern that you might recognize below:

Dead Patch of Grass 01 Dead Patch of Grass 02

So then I started to dig and scrape and poke around that part of the yard a bit more. And you know what I uncovered?

Dead Grass - The Reason? A Concrete Pad!

A concrete pad the perfect size for a garden shed!

We eventually want a garden shed, but definately not there near the middle of the back yard. We were thinking in the back left corner of the yard.

I guess that the previous owners just decided to stick the turf on top of it, either hoping that the grass would grow with just the soil attached to the roots, or just trying to hide it from the sucker buyers, namely me. So now I’ll have to break it up and haul it off to the dump, then I’ll have to purchase new soil and turn to stick down where this pad was. Bummer…

Bad Townsville Contractors & Dismantled Deck In the Garden

The contractors that we had hired almost didn’t the deck down in time from the old house. They didn’t show up for work on time and didn’t take advantage of the days without any rain to pull down the deck. Instead they left it to the last available three days when it was pouring rain (a very heavy tropic storm) to get done. Then they went ahead and told me that they had been out the night before until after 3:00am at the casino. It didn’t instill a lot of confidence…

Dismantled Deck sitting in the Garden Bed

In the end they delivered the pieces of our deck into our back yard on the last possible day. Although we had considered using them for the building that needs to happen under the house after it is lifted I have lost all confidence in them and won’t be hiring them, even if they come in with a very cheap quote. They could definitely talk a good game, but they just didn’t deliver.

Moving Bricks – 12km Walk!

I spent about 7 hours on Sunday moving bricks from our old house to our new house. Because we don’t have any vehicle access to our back yard I had to carry the brick from the font of the property to the very back of the property so that they aren’t in the way when we go to lift the house. Each trip was about 100m of walking, and I had to do 120 trips carrying 6 bricks each time, for a total of 12km of walking, 6 km with the bricks and 6 km without. All this for what looks like not very many bricks…

Pile of bricks - it looks too small...

That was only one load in our truck from work that I borrowed. I still have another half load to do, but it might be a while until I am feeling not as sore as I am now to carry them all…

We are planning to put these bricks under our deck after we get that installed on the back of the house. This will give Caleb a place to ride his bikes and play with his cars.