Month: October 2011

Find a House for Removal in Australia with Drake Homes

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If you are looking for a house for removal in Australia there are a few places you can go. I remember in Townsville there was actually a lot where they had a number of old houses for sale, but it was quite hit and miss with what was available, and there was never really all that great of a selection.

You can always try looking on ebay, but the selection there is pretty pathetic at the moment with only five houses currently listed.

The best place that I have found where you can find a house for removal in Australia is the private selling listings over at Drake Homes. There are over 50 homes currently listed for sale on the site from all over Australia. They also have a specific page for houses for sale by Drake Homes in SE QLD and NE NSW.

In addition to the listings of removal houses for sale Drake Homes also offers the following services:

  • Sell your house for removal
  • Buy a house for removal
  • Get an assessment of your house
  • Move your house to another location

There is also come great resources on their information page that will help you with your decision about purchasing, selling or moving a removal house.

If you are looking for more information you can also check out their House Removal and Recycling Blog. There are some great articles there including this one about Removing, Recycling and Renovating a house.

Easy Way to Check Your Roof Insulation and Heat Loss

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I was watching an episode of Holmes Inspection and Mike Holmes had a very easy and quick way to check on the insulation and heat loss in your roof in the winter.

Go outside the morning after a heavy snow fall. The snow fall has to be sufficient to leave snow on the roofs in your neighbourhood for this test to work. Have a look at the roofs in your area to see how much snow is on the roof.

If you see that you have had more snow melt off your roof than your neighbours then it is probably a safe bet that you have increased heat loss through your roof. This could be because of a lack of insulation, insufficient ventilation, or any other number of causes. Whatever the case, it is something that you should investigate if you want to increase the efficiency of your heating and decrease the amount of heat that you are loosing through your roof.

To view the snow depth on the above photo I had to turn up the contrast and turn down the brightness, thus making the image vary dark. Based on that photo from last winter I would say that I have minimal heat loss through the roof as I believe the only place that the snow is shallow on our roof was caused by the wind. Thankfully there appears to be no significant heat loss through the roof.

I’m going to have another look at this after our first significant snow fall this upcoming winter and will post the results and photos on this site. I will also put some photos of other houses where you can see the heat loss by the melted snow on their roofs so you can see what I’m talking about.

Installing a Vented Range Hood on Internal Half Wall

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After a few years of putting up with a smelly house every time I cook we finally decided to install an exhausted range hood. As I wrote in our last post, the challenge is that the range hood is installed on in internal half wall.

I managed to get some help last weekend to get the range hood installed and it turned out really well, with a few surprises and unexpected twists like always.

My original plan was to simply take the doors off the cupboards and then use a 7″ hole saw to drill through the sides of the cupboards. Some of the challenges that we had are that we could not get a 7″ hole saw as no where that I could find actually rented them and I didn’t want to spend $70+ to buy one. Trying to use a jigsaw and a smaller hole saw didn’t work out too well.

Removing the Kitchen Cabinets

After the failed attempt to cut the holes with the cupboards on the wall we decided the best thing to do was to remove the cupboards from the wall. This proved to be a bit harder than expected as instead of the expected silicone between the tiles and the bottom of the cupboard it was grouted, which caused a bit more time and effort to remove cleanly.

With the cupboards removed we were able to start the cuts in the sides and bottom of the cupboard with a smaller hole saw and then continue them with a jigsaw.

One thing that I was worried about when I started this project was putting a 7″ hole through the side of the house. I figured that with that size of a hole, and with my luck, I was sure to hit a stud in the wall. Fortunately though we were able to squeeze the pipe right beside a stud, without effecting the structure of the wall at all, which was great news.

Reinstalling the Cabinets and Running the Pipe

Once we got the hole cut in the exterior wall we re-installed the cupboards back into their original position. We then installed the new range hood and measured and cut the long length of pipe, installed the outside vent and then ran it through from the outside of the house. We used lots of silicone on the outside of the vent hood to create a tight seal and screwed the vent to the outside wall. The rest of the pipe and fittings all fit together nicely and we screwed and taped all the joins.

Insulating the Duct Work

Once that was done we spray foamed the exterior wall around the pipe and wrapped the pipe with duct insulation up to the 90 degree bend just above the range hood.

While insulating the duct work would have seemed quite absurd for our house in Australia, here in Canada it is quite a necessity. When the outside temperature drops to well below freezing you really need to everything possible to keep that cold air outside. The outside vent that we choose has a heavy baffle and there is a second baffle as part of the actual range hood.

At this point we flipped the switch on the breaker and tested out the new range hood, and boy does it suck! And by suck I mean pull a lot of air into the hood. The model of rangehood we got, NuTone Deluxe Allure® III, is rated at about 300 CFM on the “3” setting, and 430 CFM in boost mode, which is a lot…

At this point the range hood works, but it’s not too pretty yet, so the next step is to box in the duct work in the cabinets, which I will get to next time…