Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

6 Advantages and 6 Disadvantages of Composite Decking

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The use of composite decking really seems to be taking off here. While at the Calgary Home and Garden Show I had a bit of a chat at a decking booth. He told me that composite decking material is becoming more and more common. They are still building more timber/wood decks than composite decks, but composite decks are becoming more popular and common.

Below are a few advantages that they talked about with composite decking materials:

  1. No evidence of nails / nice flat finish
  2. Environmentally friendly, made from recycled material (plastics bags, milk bottles, etc.)
  3. Pre-coloured and never has to be painted, oiled or stained
  4. Easy to clean with a hose
  5. Smooth, splinter free finish
  6. Flexible material with many unique possibilites over wood / timber

All of those sounded too good to be true so I did a bit of research into composite decking material after coming home. There is a lot of good things about it, but there are also a few concerns that I found on the Internet about composite building materials. Here are a few of them: Continue Reading →

New Townsville Contractors Page

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I’ve added a “Townsville Contractors” Page to the web-site.

Slowly I will be adding more information to the page about different contractors that we work with during our renovation process. Each contractor will have their own page, with specific information about our experience with them. It will probably take me a while to fill out all the information, but it will come.

For now you can check out some brief descriptions of the contractors, and find my personal rating (out of five) of our experience with them at the new Townsville Contrators page.

A Canadian Beaver Ate My Door!

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Did a Beaver Chew on my Timber Door?

Here in Australia we need to protect our houses from numerous pests, especially termites. But one thing that we didn’t expect to have to protect our house against was a Canadian Beaver!!!

Our Canadian Beaver - Look at those TeethIn this case the Canadian Beaver was in fact our four year old son. For reasons that we simply can not fathom our son decided to eat the door on this particular morning! He has had some pretty strange things for breakfast before, but this is certainly a first for him…

Townsville Stump Grinding

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We had to remove some more tree stumps from our yard so that we could move the fence into the proper boundary position. The previous owners had moved the fence into the neighbours hard and planted a stack of trees on the property line. Now our neighbours are putting in a new car port, so we are needing to move the fence line back and get rid of the trees.

With the neighbours we cut down the trees a few months back, but now we had to get rid of the old tree stumps. We had considered hiring out a bobcat to rip them up, but with the root system on these trees that could have caused a bit too much damage to our driveway and possible the nice new slab under our house. So we decided that the best thing for us to do would be to get in a stump grinder to grind down the tree stumps.

Townsville Stump Grinding owner Ivan

We had dealt with Ivan from Townsville Stump Grinding before when grinding down the stumps in our backyard and were very happy with his work, so we decided to use him again to get rid of these new stumps. Continue Reading →