Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Bad Townsville Contractors & Dismantled Deck In the Garden

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The contractors that we had hired almost didn’t the deck down in time from the old house. They didn’t show up for work on time and didn’t take advantage of the days without any rain to pull down the deck. Instead they left it to the last available three days when it was pouring rain (a very heavy tropic storm) to get done. Then they went ahead and told me that they had been out the night before until after 3:00am at the casino. It didn’t instill a lot of confidence…

Dismantled Deck sitting in the Garden Bed

In the end they delivered the pieces of our deck into our back yard on the last possible day. Although we had considered using them for the building that needs to happen under the house after it is lifted I have lost all confidence in them and won’t be hiring them, even if they come in with a very cheap quote. They could definitely talk a good game, but they just didn’t deliver.

Moving Bricks – 12km Walk!

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I spent about 7 hours on Sunday moving bricks from our old house to our new house. Because we don’t have any vehicle access to our back yard I had to carry the brick from the font of the property to the very back of the property so that they aren’t in the way when we go to lift the house. Each trip was about 100m of walking, and I had to do 120 trips carrying 6 bricks each time, for a total of 12km of walking, 6 km with the bricks and 6 km without. All this for what looks like not very many bricks…

Pile of bricks - it looks too small...

That was only one load in our truck from work that I borrowed. I still have another half load to do, but it might be a while until I am feeling not as sore as I am now to carry them all…

We are planning to put these bricks under our deck after we get that installed on the back of the house. This will give Caleb a place to ride his bikes and play with his cars.

Painted – Office

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Finishing off my series of before and after photos from us painting and moving into our new house here are some images of the Office:

Office Before Painting and Moving
Office before Tamara Left
Office After Painting and Moving In
Office after we painted and moved in

It’s unfortunately not a very good before and after comparison because they are from different angles and with different lighting, but I hope that you can see at least a bit of a difference. Something that you can’t see, but that I will be writing about later with photos, is that the previous owners liked the green so much that all the ceilings were also green! Not my first choice, so the new colour is white.

Where Did Everyone Go?

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Last month we put a post in the local free trading paper about some old security screens, western cedar Venetian blinds and a Roman blind that we pulled out of our old house. We can’t use any of them here at our new house,even after we raise and built in under, so we figured that we would sell them off.

The paper came out yesterday and we have had six calls already about them in the last two days. Five of them have made times to come and have a look at them. I took off a bit early from work today to meet three different people at our house at 5:00 who wanted to buy screens. Only one person showed up. The day before I had set up to meet with two people, only one of which showed up, 1 and a half hour late. It’s a bit frustrating and I am wondering if it’s really worth the aggravation to sell this stuff.

Yesterday I was also supposed to meet with a builder and our house lifter at our home at 4:30, so again I left work a bit early, and again they never showed up. Not even a phone call. This definitely makes me a bit disappointed as the house lifter has been very good up to this point. I’m going to have to call him this week to see what happened and to get a price on the building that will happen under house after it’s been raised and restumped.