Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

This Time It’s 8cm Too Small for a Deck

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In one of my previous posts, 4cm Too Small for a Bathroom, I wrote about how we had to get rid of our built in wardrobe in the master bedroom and put the family bathroom there instead because there was not enough room under the stairs for a bathroom, by 4cm.

Well this time we found out from the Townsville City Council that our house is 8cm too close to the boundary line than the current council regulations allow! This is a problem because we are wanting to put a deck on the back of the house that is in line with the current house…

It was a good experience for us to meet the neighbours on that side of us. The council informed us that we just needed to get their permission for the construction and then it shouldn’t be a problem. They gave us permission quite willingly, which was great, so now town planning is looking into it and they will hopefully give us a verdict soon. If everything comes up good then we should actually be able to move on ahead of schedule with the raise and restump of our house, which would be really good since Tamara (my wife) is now 30.5 weeks pregnant!

At the moment we are at stage 5 on our House Lifting and Restumping Schedule, except so far instead of the builder and architect having to get new things off to council, we are the ones doing it.

Some other good news is that the guy who will be raising and restumping our house will only need us out of the house for a week, instead of the three weeks that we thought we might have to be out for. (See previous article Out of the House for Three Weeks!!! to see when we were told that.)

Painted – Bathroom

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Continuing on with my series of before and after photos from us painting and moving into our new house here are some images of the Bathroom:

Bathroom before Painting
Bathroom before Tamara Left
Bathroom before Painting
Bathroom after Painting

In the photo we painted the corrugated iron white as when it was unpainted we found it to be extremely over powering. We also added a towel rail, changed the toilet roll holder and replaced the timber venetian blind with a white aluminium venetian blind.

My original plan was to also replace the vanity with a new timber one and ivory top to match the bath and the other timber in the bathroom. Unfortunately when I was doing this while Tamara was away most of the shops here in Townsville, or their distributors, were closed for Christmas and New Years.

And yes, that is a spa bath…

Great Australian Renovation Book

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As I’ve been planning for the renovations to our house I went out looking for a book about renovating here in Australia. There are a lot of books out there, but most of them are mostly relevant to the US market, rather than Australia.

Finally at a local book store I found not one, but two books specific to building and renovating in Australia! The first book was very specific to Townsville and new house building. The Townsville part was great because it dealt with a lot of the unique challenges that we have living in the topics, but because it dealt so much with new house building, instead of renovating, it didn’t work for me.

The second book, the one that I ended up buying, was called “Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation – by Alex May. The book was $26.95, but I had a gift voucher for $20.00, so it only cost me $6.95 out of pocket.

The book has great information about budgeting, planning, dealing with builders and tradespeople (which I need a lot of work on, basically I need to develop a backbone…), three different case studies and some useful money-saving and design tips. They cover the little jobs, like re-grouting the tiles, all the way up to basically gutting and rebuilding the home.

It’s a good book, and from what I have read and experienced so far in my own renovation journey, it’s a book that I would highly recommend to someone doing house renovations here in Australia.

— Update —

After I got on the Internet today I found a link to the web-site about the book. The Link is below:

Plans in to Council

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With the help of the contractor doing the house lifting we have now submitted our preliminary plans to the Townsville City Council for the raise, restump and building in of our house.

Our plans actually have to go through Town Planning despite us pulling our garage under the original roof line, as I wrote about in “New Floorplan for the House“. It seems that the house is less then the regulation 6 metres from the front boundary and even though we are not changing the location of the house Town planning still needs to see and aprove the plans. Bit of a pain but the house lifting contractor thinks that we should be able to have it through some time this week, which would be great.

We are still waiting on the engineering plans to get to us, but City Council doesn’t need that until Town Planning has approved it anyways…

Let’s just wait and see what happens this week.