I figured that it was about time to update how the various stages of our renovations are going right now:

Enclosing Under our Queenslander

The actual enclosing under of our Queenslander is now complete. It has been finished up to lockup stage, so all the windows, exterior doors and cladding are now up. We can lock up under the house now, have a (mostly) enclosed laundry and can park our car under the house behind an automatic panel lift door.

I still have to paint, hopefully before the wet season, but the cladding is already primed, so it’s at least protected from the elements for now.

Building In Under our Queenslander

Although the house has been complete to the lock up stage, we are now “paused” with completing the building in process. Because of some unexpected work that had to be complete upstairs during the enclosing stage (replacing the bathroom and attaching the roof) we have been put behind schedule and over budget.

The walls under our house have all been framed, the plumbing has been run and the electrical cabling has been mostly completed, but this is where we sit right now. We have been quoted $8000 to sheet the walls under house, including all plasterboard, villaboard and plastering. It’s tempting to do, but unfortunately not at this time.

We also have flooring, bathroom fit outs, the electrical fit out, an internal staircase and painting to do before it becomes livable down there.

Roof Insulation

As I speak (I meant “writing”) we are having spray on roof insulation applied on our corrugated iron roof. We had this done at our other house and it worked really well at reducing the temperature in the house. With summer coming we figured that it was about time to get this done.

We are also getting a wirly bird installed to help draw the hot air out of the ceiling cavity.

Building our Deck

I have had to redesign our deck based on conversations with our builder and the company that originally built the deck on our first house. In case you don’t know, we actually took our deck from our other house and it has been sitting in our backyard ever since.

I have completed the deck plans and will be in contact with our builder in the coming weeks to discuss installing the stairs, frame and the posts for the deck. I hope to install all the decking, banisters, privacy screen and roof myself, or rather with the help of some “skilled” friends

Garden Shed

While we were in Canada we were amazingly blessed by someone giving us the money to put up a garden shed in our backyard. Right now we are waiting for the deck to be put up so that there is space for the garden shed to go. We have also been advised to wait a bit before putting the shed up as the Townsville City Council will be relaxing it’s rules on the boundary lines, so we should be able to put the shed closer to our fence lines when those rules are relaxed.

Family Time

Unfortunately we have found ourselves falling back into the old habits of not having enough family time on the weekends and putting too much time into the house. This is a balance that we are still struggling to find.

Yesterday we were meant to play tennis in our backyard in the afternoon, but instead our front screen door fell off so I spent the whole afternoon fixing that (it’s a metal frame, so it wasn’t as easy as I hoped, and the rivet gun jammed while I was using it). We ended up playing “Go Fish” together after dinner, but Caleb was especially disappointed that we didn’t get to play tennis like we said we would.

If you want to find out more about what’s been happening please feel free to explore the archives on this web-site…