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.

I got this e-mail from someone in Sydney …

Allan Zhong wrote:

I have a fibrate house in Sydney that we want moved away. I’m wondering, do you want it?

I am guessing that they meant a “fibro” house for removal in Sydney.

I have no need or want for the house, but I thought that I would put it out there in case there is someone else out there who might want it. If you do then just put a comment below and I can put you in touch with Allan so that you can discuss the removal of the house.

After a lot of time, painting and hard work we are finally moved downstairs!

The final stage for this you would have though would have been finishing the internal staircase, but we still had a lot of painting and preparation to do before we could finally move down into the four new bedrooms, including painting the new staircase.

The kids are now moved into their bedrooms and we are moved into our master "retreat", as Tamara calls it. The new master bedroom feels huge, and it is so nice to finally have a wardrobe / closet, as well as the ensuite.

I’ll post some photos soon of the kids bedrooms, our master bedroom and the ensuite…

I had a comment from a friend that in the last photo that I took of the staircase you couldn’t actually tell that it was an open tread design for the stairs. They were a bit surprised about what it looked like when they saw it in person.

So here is a photo I just took of the staircase from below. You can much more easily see how the open tread design looks.

The area under the stairs will make for some great storage, but because of the open treads we will have to make sure to keep them nice and tidy.

One thing about the rich colour of the stairs is that they make for some great photo opportunities with the kids …

Since the new internal stairs are finally almost ready for us to use we have removed our old rear external staircase.

The old rear staircase actually consisted of half of the old (per-house lift) front stairs welded to the original rear stairs. The railing was a single 2 x 4 attached to the house at the top and two posts screwed to the sides of the stairs. They were put on as a temporary staircase two and a half years ago, and I guess have held up pretty well.

With the rear external staircase finally removed I can now look at building a patio and erecting a patio cover. The old staircase sat right in the middle of where those things should fit in.

The stairs are finished and we are able to start painting.

They have turned our really well. The dark Kwila timber stair treads actually manage to flow quite well with the pine floorboards up the top. I was actually quite surprised that they turned out almost the same colour as the Western Red Cedar louvers above the stairwell, and the timber shelf separating the kitchen from the new stairwell (you can see it in the top right of the photo).

We are considering paying someone to paint the stairwell for us. Our builder recommended someone to us and they were out today to have a look at it. We should get the quote from them tomorrow and we will see what the damage could be. As soon as the stairwell is painted then we can make the move downstairs.

We are very eager to finally be living down there, we are only about 2-years behind schedule …

On the third day of our stairway construction the landing was put on in the middle of the staircase and the plasterer started on the plastering.

Because the area that we are putting the staircase isn’t very big I was tempted to put in winders instead of a landing. The landing takes up about the same amount of space as 6 treads on a 180 degree turn like what we have (3 tread on a 90 degree turn), so it would have save us a lot of space for our staircase. There are disadvantages to winders in your staircase though, including:

• Increased cost
• Much more complicated design
• One end of the winder is very narrow and it is easy to slip on (not good for kids)

For us the decision mostly came down to cost. There would not have been too much advantage in using a winder, so we went with the more basic design of a hardwood landing. The space was pretty much perfect for the standard design anyway.

The treads were installed on the fourth day. It’s exciting to see it coming together finally. The plasterer was also here sanding and plastering the walls more.

They still need to put on the trim and handrail, and finish off the polishing of the landing. Unfortunately the plastered didn’t use any drop sheets on the landing, so the builders are not too happy about that, and they need to re-sand and polish the landing. That’ll slow them down a bit more, which they weren’t counting on.

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?

The first day of our stair installation saw the floor cut out of our old office area and the landing and lower stringers installed. They have also put the plasterboard over the gap between the ground floor and the first floor.

They were quite surprised at how well the walls all lined up. The only place really that they had some trouble was the back wall where the steam beam had been put up against the floor bearer. They have had to build out the plasterboard around that steam bearer to finish it off.

We managed to keep most of the mess out this time around with the taping that I did getting ready for the stairs to be installed. It made for an easier time when we got home from the day out, but we still had a bit to clean up.

The second day of the stair installation saw the second run of stringers run up to the first floor. They have also built up the wall between the two sets of stairs.

As you can see in the photo the wall is built from the floor below right up to the top floor. It separates the two sets of stairs and will act as the banister for the top run of the staircase. The individual banister will then be attached to the new wall on the lower run of stairs.

We have also had the hardwood stair treads delivered and cut today.

The timber used for the treads is Kwila. We will be finishing the treads so that they look similar to the timber louvers in the stairwell. It’s a soft natural satin finish, rather than the traditional high gloss polyurethane finish.

We will be using hardwood decking boards on the landing between the two sets of stirs, so it should come up looking really good by the end of next week.

We have emptied out our office area in anticipation of the stairs going in. Glenn was just here checking it out and he said they will be ready to start cutting out the floor tomorrow morning at 7:00 am. They will be cutting out the floor in the area and dropping it down below.

After the mess that we experienced when they had to cut out the bathroom floor we aren’t taking any chances this time around. I’ve already put up a plastic sheet over the area separating the stair area from the kitchen, and before we leave tomorrow morning I’ll be sheeting up the entrance between the dining room and stair area.

We have gone with an open tread design on the stairs, as the cost is about half that of an enclosed staircase.

The landing and stringers were delivered this morning and I’m just waiting for the treads to be delivered so that I can get started vanishing them. Hopefully starting next week we will actually be able to live upstairs and downstairs in our house!

It will feel pretty amazing to finally get to that point.