Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Our House Might be 140 Years Old!

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The builder who is building the walls under our house reckons that our house could be as old as 140 years, built around the 1870s. I had started to pursue the age of my house a bit more last week while looking around the Townsville City Council Web-Site.

As I stated in the previous article after looking at the City Council site a bit I started to think that maybe our house was a bit older than the original 1930s estimate that a previous builder had estimated. Our current builder based his estimates on the structure of the original joists and floor boards. Considering our luck with the previous builder, I would probably put a lot more weight on this new builders estimate.

This builder also thinks that the house was originally a Minors Cottage from Charters Towers that was moved to Townsville around the turn of the 20th century.

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Kids Bedrooms Framed and Hallway Half Framed

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Internal Wall Frame to Half of HallwayAgain I came from work today to see some pretty good progress happening on the house.

As you can see on the left the hallway framing is half completed and the kids bedrooms seem to be pretty much done, which you can see below.

Caleb again had fun walking through the frames figuring out which room was his, where the windows will be and where his wardrobe is.

In two of the smaller bedrooms (I have to stop calling them “kids” bedrooms, since we only have two kids and three small bedrooms, people might start getting ideas!) we have built in wardrobes. We had actually planned to have them in all three, but we will be getting a large non-built in robe for Jessica’s room upstairs soon, so we will be moving that one into the third small bedroom eventually.

We have also put a linen closet in the hallway, which I always appreciated having in my parent’s place. Well, more like I appreciate it now, not so much as a teenager.

Internal Wall Frame to Kids Bedrooms

More External Frames and the Garage

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External Framing Back WallExternal Framing GarageThey guys are still cruising through the job very quickly. Today they finished building what looks like all of the external frames for the house!

Most of the bracing ply looks to up as well, which is good. Some of the days this week the whole house was swaying because they had removed the temporary bracing struts to make way for the wall frames. With the new bracing ply on it should make the house feel much more solid.

The garage is really taking shape so that we can see the size of it, and where the laundry is going to fit. Today Tamara said that we had better not be getting a long car anytime soon, and she is right. There wouldn’t be room for a car over 6m in the garage if we want to still be able to use the laundry. I am still hoping that I have room down the side for some shelves and storage, but like many things right now, time will tell.

We had to go for a few hours without water today as they re-routed some of the temporary plumbing, but there has actually been very little disruption for us as they have been working under there. Well, besides the noise of course…

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How Old is my House?

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For a long time I have assumed that our house is from the 1930’s. I have thought this because one builder told us that is when he thought it was from.

I was looking around the Townsville City Council web-site to try to find specifications and examples of deck roofs and I came across a page about “Tracing the History of Your Townsville House“.

1870 - 1930 Colonial Federation and Interwar Pyramid HouseFrom reading their description of common Townsville house styles it would appear as though our house more closely resembles a house from late 1860s – 1910s, like the image on the left.

That would make our house at a lot older than we thought, and closer to the age of our neighbour’s house, who said their house was from about that era.

To complicate things even more a lot of houses during that era were transported from the mining towns, like Charters Towers, to Townsville. Someone else had told us that it looked like our house had been transported from Charters Towers, but at the moment I don’t really know…