Townsville Housing Market Starting to Slow

Townsville is finally starting to be hit by a housing market slowdown in the last few months. There are fewer enquiries to purchase homes and what has been a sellers market is becoming a buyers market. Sellers are no longer able to set their price and not bother with negotiating, they now need to set a more realistic price for their home if they want it to sell.

With standard home loans around 9.4% here in Australia fewer people are wanting to make a move into the housing market. Also with house prices in Townsville still quite high housing affordability it at an all time low in Australia.

Townsville bucked the trend from the recent house price declines in many of the capital cities in Australia, so it was only a matter of time before this market correction came.

The question now is how far will the prices fall for houses in Townsville?

Source: ABC News – TSV Housing Market Struggles

Painting Progress Update

About six weeks ago I took a week off to paint, thinking that I would be able to finish most of it that week. Well, I didn’t even finish the undercoat that first week, it took me three weeks to do the prep and undercoat!

Well, I’ve continued to paint in the evenings and weekends and here is a floor plan update of how far I’ve gotten with the painting

Painting_Progress_Map As you can see, nothing is finished yet, but we are making progress. I just had a few friends over this morning, which was a huge help. Hopefully I can pull some more help together in the coming weeks and eventually get it done.

The room that has nothing done is the garage, and it isn’t a high priority. I don’t think that my parent’s garage ever got painted, despite living there for over 20-years now.

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How to Hide an Ugly Box Air Conditioner

Box air conditioners are everywhere here in North Queensland. Almost all of the old Queenslanders have been fitted out with them and box air conditioners are an inexpensive way to add air conditioning to your house.

Conceal an ugly box air conditioner close upOne downside to box air conditioners is that they are ugly looking things, especially if you can see them from the road down the side of the house, or worse, on the front of the house.

On one side of our house the box air conditioners for the kids rooms are pretty well hidden by the trees. You actually have to try to see them, so I’m not too worried about them.

On the left side of our house though the box air conditioner sticks out like a sore thumb (as you can see above). This room will eventually be our office and because it is at the front of the house it is really quite obvious.

hide a box air conditioner

Even though split air conditioners are become more common box air conditioners are still being installed in a lot of new homes. One of these new homes that we saw had a box air conditioner visible right from the front of the house, so they built a simple slotted box and installed that around it (see the photo on the right).

Although it doesn’t actually conceal the air conditioner, it at least helps it to blend in a lot more with the rest of the house. I might do something like this with ours, or we might wait to see if the new window hoods we are putting on the house will help to hide it. I hope that this is the case, but we will see.

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Easy Garage Storage Shelf Solution Finished

I put up my cheap and easy garage storage shelf a few weeks ago, with plans to finish the shelf off with a bit of timber along the front and side of the shelf. Here is a photo of the finished project …

Easy and Cheap Garage Storage Shelf Solution

As you can see, I added the timber trim around the outside of the garage shelf and painted the timber that I used to join the two shelves together. My original plan was to paint the timber trim white, but I like the raw timber look, so I reckon that I will leave it at that.

All up the project for a 3.6m long garage storage shelf cost me around $120.00, which is a lot cheaper then any of the ready made solutions I could find at Bunnings or Mitre 10.