We have been looking at what kind of internal staircase to build into our house. The new internal stairs will be put in where our current office is and the will need to be a curved staircase with a landing in the middle. The space that we have for the staircase is actually quite small, so the stairs will need to be narrow.

We were considering two types of of staircases; an enclosed staircase or an open staircase. There were pros and cons for both:

Enclosed Staircase

Pros:
- separate zones for air conditioning
- better sound proofing

Cons:
- cost

Open Staircase

Pros:
- cost
- ease and speed of construction

Cons:
- louder
- open airflow

I guess that after writing out the pros and cons of each type of staircase I realize that I should probably explain more about what I meant by each type of staircase.

The enclosed staircase that we were looking at included a door at the bottom of the stairs to separate the ground and top floor. This would stop the air conditioning from our living room from having to cool the downstairs hallway, as well as the lounge room, dining room and kitchen. This is the kind of configuration that I have seen on most houses in Calgary where there is an undeveloped basement, which is closed off by the door.

The open staircase would have open stringers and hardwood treads. Between the treads would be open (sort of like our external staircase) so there would be nothing to stop the noise and air conditioning from going down or up the stairs.

After weighing up the options, and considering our finances we have decided to go with the open tread design on our internal staircase. It works out to be about half the price, and it can be completed fairly easily. Also because the opening for the internal stairs is quite far away from the air conditioner we don’t think that we will actually loose much cold air down the stairway.

If we really want to down the track we can always look at enclosing the open staircase anyways. I really doubt that it will come to that, but the option will be there if we find we need to.

Technorati Tags: stairs

To be honest I am so emotionally tired right now that I don’t really feel like writing anything, but I am hoping that this will help me to process a bit…

On Friday last week, if you recall, we found out that we need to replace the floor in our bathroom. This means gutting the entire bathroom and starting from scratch with a new bathroom floor, walls and ceiling.

I got a phone call this morning from our builder asking when I would be home, and suggesting that I bring a camera with me when I come to take a photo of something.

So I get there and he shows me how after removing the wall sheeting he can lift up the roof just by pushing on it ! Here is a series of photos of the wall frames, the roof trusses and the ceiling frame, I’ll explain more about the problems after you see the photos.

The top two photos show the wall between the dining room and the bathroom. Although it is an internal wall, it is a load bearing wall. Being a load bearing wall it should be made of structural grade timber (it’s not), it should have a large, high strength continuous beam running the entire width of it (it doesn’t) and it should be tied down to the roof trusses (again it isn’t).

The third photo shows the external wall, which is also a structural / load bearing wall. This is where our builder was able to lift the roof just by pushing up on it. The external wall at least has the continuous beam running the full lenth, and some of it is structural timber, but a lot of the wall framing has been cut in half to put in the louvers and the concrete floor, and again the roof trusses are not tied down to the top beam on the wall , and some of the trusses have been installed upside down.

With the roof itself there is also not enough support for the tin that is there . There is supposed to be either 60 or 90 cm between the timber under the tin (I can’t remember which at the moment), but on our roof there is nearly a metre and a half gap in some places!

Our builder reckons that most of these problems continue into the office area of our house as well. So he will be pulling down the ceiling in the office, which is sagging in a lot of places, and having a look at it.

I won’t know until tomorrow what this all means, but what I do know for sure is that the renovation costs are now due to blow out even more. We have already needed to change our expectations to where we won’t be moving in under the house anytime soon, so I don’t know what all these additional problems with our roof and load bearing walls is going to mean…

Technorati Tags: roofing, walls, framing

Last week I ended up with bruised nuckles after I punched my car after a rather frustrating meeting with an engineer about some of the “stranger” features of our renovations…

I must admit that this renovation process is a lot more complicated and aggrivating than I had thought it would be. I was looking at the real estate section of the newspaper last weekend and thought about how nice it would be to buy the house down the street that already has four bedrooms, two living areas and a new kitchen.

Now with an extra week behind me I am feeling a bit better about the whole project. This week I met with my original architect and I found out that the strange things in the drawings were actually recommended by our original builders, who we got rid of quite a while ago. The main thing that had been bugging me was that the drawing had required a new joist to be run next to every existing joist. This is a lot of extra work and materials, which means a lot of extra money for me. Now I need to get in touch with the builders who had quoted us already and get them to re-quote the work with the new information from the architect, which was that the extra joists were not needed.

If it all goes how I hope these changes will hopefully mean that we can afford to go ahead with the full renovations, rather than just getting the shell under the house done.

Last week we bought back our deck from the developers that purchased out old house and land. If you read one of my previous posts, Overcapitalization vs. Life Style, we paid about $20,000 to get the deck put onto our house a year and a half ago. Well, we just bought it back for $1000! Pretty crazy eh?

We have not yet been quoted on the removal and then re-installation costs by our builder, but it should come in at a lot less than the original $20,000.

We are having to be quite careful we go about renovating our house. You quite often hear about this issue when you look at spending any substantial amount of money on a house, so I wanted to put down some of what I think about it here.

For us it’s a bit of a balance between overcapitalising and life style.  On our first house we spent about $20,000 on a deck that a few people, including my dad, told us was over capitalising.  I think that if we lived anywhere else other than in the tropics they would have been right.  Here in Townsville though the deck takes on the roll of a second living area and a true extention of our house, which is why we want to add one to the new house as soon as we can.  For us this is a big life style issue

If we were purchasing this house with the plan to be out of it within only a couple of years then our plans would be significantly different that what we actually have.  Our primary focus would be on getting the most financial return, or Return of Investment (ROI) for our money, rather than what we are going for, which is the best life style that we can have within our limited budget.

The article linked to below gives a bit of insight into what they think offers good return for investment with houses.

The ROI of Remodeling in 2005 | HouseBlogs.net

Tamara and I have been trying to work out a budget for our renovation. With the house lifting we have so far got 4 different quotes. They have a variation of about 35% and they all seem to cover the exact same things!

Raising and Restumping our house will, we hope, be the largest expense for our renovation. After that expense the next biggest will most likely be our deck and actually enclosing and building under the lifted house.

I have found that there is no company that will give us an exact price for lifting the house. They will usually give us some estimates but it’s normally accompanied with the statement “There could be some variation in that depending on …”.

Because of that it is quite hard to budget for the steps that we need to take in our renovation after lifting. We need to start booking people now as the contractors are so busy in Townsville, but it’s hard to know how many steps ahead to book since we don’t actually know how much money we will have to work with.

I read a good article about budgeting finances and time for renovations. You can read about it here:

Housebuilder’s Update: On time, on budget