Month: April 2006

Where did the house go?

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Last year is when Tamara and I made the big move and sold our old house to Castletown, The Street that Castletown Bought. In January this year we moved out of the old house and into our new house which has been the subject for the majority of this site. We would still drive past our old empty house every weekend when we went shopping, but this week was a bit different.

Our Old House before we moved out
Our old house

This week when I drove past our old house it wasn’t there!

Where our old house was before relocation

Where we used to park our car before the house was relocated
Where is it now?

I think that Caleb was a bit confused as well since he knew that was where our old house used to be, but all of a sudden it was gone!

It is the first of the twenty or so houses that Castletown purchased that has been moved or destroyed. It looks like a lot of the other houses have been prepared for removal, but none have gone yet. An article in the weekend paper said that Castletown plans to have the renovations completed by the end of the year, so I guess that they will getting rid of the other houses soon.

Find a Trademan Anywhere in Australia with BANGitUP Australia

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I just came across a service that appears to make it easy to find a builder or tradesman anywhere in Australia from one web-site. You write down your details, and a few details of the job, and the request is then sent by SMS to various contractors around your area.

The first three tradesmen to respond are then put on a list for you to look at and you can then contact them directly to organize a face to face meeting. None of your details are sent to them, it’s up to you if you contact them or not. The details that you get on the list includes references, which can be helpful.

They claim to have over 40,000 tradesmen in their database, so it looks like it should cover a lot of areas, and best of all, it looks like it’s free!

You can check out at BANGitUP Australia – Trade Select.

Why is the House Built on Stumps?

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Gregory over at The Joy of Home Ownership posed a few very good questions to me about why out house was constructed the way that it is. I’ll go through some of his questions to see if I can answer them well enough.

1. Why is your house built on stilts?
From what I can tell there are a few reasons for this:

  • It keeps the house cooler
    – By allowing the breeze to blow under the house it is supposed to help cool the house down. In the older houses that have not had the floors covered up or replaced you can usually even find gaps in the floorboards that are supposed to help even more with the cooling.
  • Keeps us away from the critters
    When the Europeans first started coming to this area they wanted to stay as far away from the snakes, crocs, spiders and other insects as they could, so they went up
  • Flooding
    Being in the tropics there is always the threat of a lot of rain and flooding. By being up higher it helps keep us away from the water.
  • Emulates the style in the Pacific Islands
    I read this somewhere, but of course now I can’t find it. Apparently Captain Cook was quite impressed with how well the huts in the Pacific Island withstood the weather and provided a good home so the style was somewhat emulate in Northern Australia. This also explains the unique shapes of some of our roofs.

2. What is the space under the house used for?

  • Most people seem to use the space for car parking, storage and a workshop. I did that at our other place and did it here for the first few months.
  • Raising and restumping the houses so that the area under can be enclosed and built in is become more common in the old Queenslanders. This is the route that we have gone with this place. This house is high enough above the flood zone that it should never really be an issue and it is a fairly easy, but not cheap as we are discovering, way to double our floor space.

3. Are there basements or crawlspaces?

  • The closest thing that I have seen to this in Australia is wine cellars, but other than that almost all construction is above ground.
  • A unique difference to this is Coober Pedy, where a lot of the homes, businesses and even a church are built in old mine shafts.

4. What about using block-work for construction?

A lot of the new homes are build using cinder-block or besa brick construction. Then the weight of the house can sit on the block work instead of stumps. Our house before we lifted had a combination of stumps and block-work for the walls under the house.

We considered using block-work again but decided to use stumps because it is difficult to insulate besa brick and they would have had to build an internal timber frame anyways. The width of the walls would be 10 – 20cm less if we used timber instead of block work and also the exterior finish would flow better from top to bottom.

I found one of my older posts entitled “Why is my house only 5 feet above the Ground?“, which explains one builders explanation of why a lot of the houses are a rather awkward 5 feet above the ground.

If there are any other questions out there please let me know and I will do my best to answer them…

What are the Footings and Foundation?

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In my previous post, Day 8 of the House Lift – Massive Footings, my mate David Couper asked what the footing were that Northern House Raising decided to leave in place. The footing is basically the bottom part of the foundations of the house and it is there to prevent settling or movement of the house or foundations.

Below is a very crude drawing of the new slab that they will be putting in. Normally here in Townsville that is all that they will put in, this is called a monolithic slab because the footing, foundation and slab are all one unit. Under the slab you will see two large black boxes which I have added to the slab to show where the original footing are.

Original Large Footings under the New Slab

In the photo below you can also sort of see how deep the original footings are compared to where the bottom of the new slab will come to. (The new slab will come to the bottom of the timber and then the old foundations extend at least 30cm below that.)

Photo of the Original Footings and the base of the new Slab

As you can see in my crude drawing above the slab isn’t just flat but has some larger concrete channels running through it to provide more structural strength. The builders have already put down some of the dirt that the new slab will sit on and you can see the pattern that the bottom of the slab will be in those photos.

Closeup of the stumps, where the concrete will be the thickest
Concrete Fill Pattern Under the Slab

In addition to the poured concrete that will make up the slab there will also be steel wire mess and reinforcing rods throughout the concrete to give it extra strength. They will also be putting the in-slab plumbing in before pouring the slab so that when we finally get to the stage of putting in the laundry and bathrooms we will already have the drainage in place.

Some of this information was found on How Your House Works – The House’s Foundation.