Month: September 2008

Sustainable House Day in Australia

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This Sunday is Sustainable House Day here in Australia and over the Tasman in New Zealand.

Sustainable House Day is a day when all around the country people living in sustainable housing will open their doors for people to visit their homes.

There will be people available to answer questions about what they did to make their homes sustainable, and what you might be able to do to make your own house more sustainable.

There seems to be a real cross-section of homes and people participating in Sustainable House Day. Here in Townsville there are two homes that are participating:

  • A retrofitted house built around 1970 that has has modifications done to make it a more sustainable home
  • A purpose built house built in 2001

Each of these homes offer two very different avenues to pursue when making your house more sustainable.

Sustainable House Day focuses a lot of attention on solar issues. This includes the passive solar design of the house (shade, eves, insulation, etc.) as well as the active uses of solar, including solar hot water and solar electricity.

The event is put on by ANZSES, the Australia New Zealand Solar Energy Society, hence the focus on solar issues.

You can find out more about Sustainable House Day here, and you can see if there are any houses available for viewing in your area here.

Extend or Add a Story to your House?

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If you are looking at increasing the living area of your house you are probably looking at one of two options:

  • Build a house extension
  • Add another story to your house

Which option you choose can depend on:

  • City council zoning laws
  • Appearance of the House from the Street
  • Costs

This web-site has documented a lot of our experiences adding another story to our home. We did this by lifting our house and then enclosing under it. It sounded at the time like the easy option, but as we’ve discovered, there is no such thing as an easy major renovation.

Over at Renovate Queenslander they have started to write about their experiences adding a major extension to their Queenslander in Brisbane, Australia.

Fabie and Warrick have decided to build a large extension onto the back of their Queenslander. They new extension will include a new main bedroom with ensuite, a new kitchen and new large deck and entertaining area. You can read about their extension plans here and and view their plans here.

Building an extension has some advantages over lifting and enclosing under your Queenslander. Here are just a few:

  • Doesn’t change the current proportions of the front of your house
  • You can build most of the extension with minimum disruption to the rest of the house
  • Only minimum work needs to be done on the existing house structure

What other advantages and / or disadvantages do you see with building an extension as apposed to adding a new story to the house?

Planning Approval Delays with the City Council

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The amalgamation of Townsville and Thuringowa has led to delays in approval for various building projects around the city. Even with simple projects, right now it can take months for approval to of the plans to occur.

This delay was one of the reasons we chose not to replace our entire driveway. I reckon that it could also be slowing down other, small projects around the city.

Given the current wait time on finding trades people in Townsville it probably impacting larger building and renovation projects too much.

The people most affected by these approval delays are probably the owner builders and home handymen working on their own, small projects.

Bunnings Fathers Day Free Event – Caleb the Tiger

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Tiger Caleb with a Bunnings Hammer Sunday was Fathers Day here in Australia and I was lucky enough to have two exciting days / events to celebrate being a dad.

Thursday night Caleb and I headed out to a free Fathers Day event put on by Bunnings. They had four craft tables set-up for Caleb to build stuff and make some cards. He built and painted a timber CD Rack for me for Fathers Day and did a special card for me. You can see the CD Rack in the photo below.

Bunnings CD Rack Fathers Day Creation In addition to the four craft tables they also had face painting, as you can see above. This was actually Caleb’s first time ever getting his face painted, and they did a fantastic job on it don’t you reckon?

We got to pet a snake, a lizard and a crocodile that were brought in from the Billabong Sanctuary. Caleb was quite brave and went up to pet each of the animals.

Bunnings also put on a free sausage sizzle for everyone there. We both love our sausages, so that was a great dinner for us, maybe not the healthiest, but certainly tasty.

Today we headed out to Reef HQ here in Townsville to have a look at the aquarium. It is a very impressive display and we were lucky enough to be there during the feeding of the predator tank. And of course we got to see Nemo (the clown fist) and Dori (Paracanthurus hepatus) along with hundreds of other fish and sea animals.

After that we watched the movie Ratatouille at home as a family and finished with a family dinner.

I reckon I’ve had a pretty good Fathers Day this year …