The Renovation Bug

Ever since Tamara and I have owned a house (only 2.5 years now) we have been renovating. Our first house we fully painted, re-did the floors, insulated the ceiling, renovated the bathroom, replaced all the doors and added a deck. This house we are doing a lot more, as you can read on the rest of this site.

Well it seems that renovation bug is contageous and has even been caught by my parents…

They have been living in the same house for about 20-years now in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The completely renovated the basement and did some medium size work in the kitchen before, but now they are renovating the entire living area upstairs to open it up from three seperate areas to one large open area. The drawings that renderings that they have sent to us have looked pretty amazing so far.

They will be starting this about the same time that we start having our house lifted so next time we go back to Canada to visit is sure is going to be a big change for us…

Raise and Restump Begins on March 6th – Northern House Raising

Despite the fact that Townsville City Council only approved our house raise and restump on the 14th of February (see Building Permit has been Approved article) the contractor will be starting the lift in only two weeks time! We’ll have to be out of the house for a week, and we don’t have a place to stay yet, but this means that we should have about a month in the house after it has been lifted before the new baby is born (April 14th if it’s on schedule).

We have been really impressed with the contractor doing the raise and restump. The company is Northern House Raising and is run by Gary Robertson. He seems to be great guy and has been helping us to move along really quickly. Unfortunately we have found that we were given some pretty crappy advise from the previous contractors that we were talking to (see Bad Townsville Contactors… article) so now we are paying for it in extra time and some costs. Gary and his builders have already saved us about $4000.00 by changing how our exterior walls on the bottom of the house will be constructed, which will be good, but more on that later.

Like pretty much every other builder and contractor in Townsville they don’t have a web-site but here are the other details for Northern House Raising if you are looking for someone to do your Raise and Restump in Townsville:

NHR PTY LTD
Northern House Raising
Director: Gary Robertson

46 Grove Crescent
Kirwin, QLD
4817

Office Ph/Fax: (07) 4723 8646
Mobile: 0409 074 324

I’ll be giving updates and hopefully posting photos of the actual process of lifting the house, but from everything I have seen of Gary so far I would definitely recommend him.

(Please note that I do not get any benefit from recommending him, but you could always mention where you heard about him from.)

Building Permit has been Approved!

I just got an e-mail from the Townsville City Council and I called them on the phone to confirm it, but we have been given approval for all of our plans! So that is very exciting news given that some people told us it would take up to three months for approval to be granted.

The council won’t release the permit for enclosing and building under until we have provided them with an insurance certificate. Since we don’t even have any quotes yet for enclosing and building under the house we don’t have a builder selected yet.

Thankfully it is a separate permit for enclosing and building than it is for raising and restumping the house. Because of that our house lifter should be able to start soon (he previously told us within about three weeks of being approved). That’s pretty exciting because it should mean that we will get that part done quite a bit before the baby is due, rather than a week before, which is what we had originally feared…

Mystery of the Dead Grass – Solved…

Just before the previous owners sold their house they put new turn / sod down in the back yard. We have been quite diligent in watering the lawn but this one patch just died, and no amount of watering helped. The patch seemed to have very square corners a fairly straight edges, so I thought that maybe that was where the put all the turn when they bought it and it had crushed the grass, or something like that. I even asked the neighbour and he couldn’t remember anything ever being there, and he couldn’t think of anything.

So last weekend we went out to purchase some grass seed and fertilizer. We found out that the kind of grass that we have, buffalo grass, can’t be planted with seeds, you need to get actual turf / sod and lay it because it’s a “creeping” grass, or something like that. All the places that sold turf were closed on the weekends so instead I purchased a pitch fork so that I could try aerating that part of the lawn and maybe apply some of the fertilizer that I already had. When I finally went to poke the holes in the ground I wound up and “twang“, I hit something very hard. I tried again somewhere else thinking that it was a rock and again, “twang“, the same thing happened.

That’s when I started to poke around the turf more carefully and I discovered a pattern that you might recognize below:

Dead Patch of Grass 01 Dead Patch of Grass 02

So then I started to dig and scrape and poke around that part of the yard a bit more. And you know what I uncovered?

Dead Grass - The Reason? A Concrete Pad!

A concrete pad the perfect size for a garden shed!

We eventually want a garden shed, but definately not there near the middle of the back yard. We were thinking in the back left corner of the yard.

I guess that the previous owners just decided to stick the turf on top of it, either hoping that the grass would grow with just the soil attached to the roots, or just trying to hide it from the sucker buyers, namely me. So now I’ll have to break it up and haul it off to the dump, then I’ll have to purchase new soil and turn to stick down where this pad was. Bummer…