New Front Stairs on our Queenslander

New Front StairsWe finally got the front stairs up on the front of our Queenslander.

What was supposed to be a one week project turned into a one month project. The specifications on stairs, especially the rise of the treads, has to be precise right down to the millimetre. Because of this it took our builder about 4 visits from his welder / boilermaker to get the rise on the second flight of stairs correct.

As you can see from the photos it’s a fairly complex design that actually consists of three different flights to get all the way up to the top floor. The original design was two flights of stairs with a landing between them, but the problem with that was that the bottom flight of stairs ran right into the driveway, which we thought was not very safe.

By going with this design it cost us a bit more money, but it gives us a safer design, especially for the kids.

Now that we have the stairs in we can finally stop using the dodgy set of stairs at the back of the house.

We will also be able to start to think about what we want to do with landscaping in the front yard of the house. Right now it’s just a dust ball, so we need to do something before the wet season comes.

We are also thinking about putting a fence between the driveway and the stairs, but we need to wait to see how much room we will actually have once the driveway is in.

New Front Stairs

A Photo or a Drawing of Your House?

When we were down in Adelaide visiting Tamara’s family I had a look through the real estate section of their newspaper and I thought that it was very interesting how they advertised some of the houses. Instead of having actual photos of the house they instead used an artists rendition of the house (like the one bellow).

House Facade Drawing

I found this curious because it really tells you almost nothing about the house, other then how the artist thinks it should look. In my previous two posts I wrote a bit about how you can word a house advertisement to give a different perspective on it, but this is a way to back that up with an image as well.

Most of these ads that I looked at on-line tonight include no actual photos of the houses, only artists renditions of the facade and then usually a drawing of the house plans and maybe the house lot.