Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Renovation Budget

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Tamara and I have been trying to work out a budget for our renovation. With the house lifting we have so far got 4 different quotes. They have a variation of about 35% and they all seem to cover the exact same things!

Raising and Restumping our house will, we hope, be the largest expense for our renovation. After that expense the next biggest will most likely be our deck and actually enclosing and building under the lifted house.

I have found that there is no company that will give us an exact price for lifting the house. They will usually give us some estimates but it’s normally accompanied with the statement “There could be some variation in that depending on …”.

Because of that it is quite hard to budget for the steps that we need to take in our renovation after lifting. We need to start booking people now as the contractors are so busy in Townsville, but it’s hard to know how many steps ahead to book since we don’t actually know how much money we will have to work with.

I read a good article about budgeting finances and time for renovations. You can read about it here:

Housebuilder’s Update: On time, on budget

Renovation Planning Hitch

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I just got off the phone with the house lifting people today and the plan that I had drawn up for under our house has to go through some pretty major revisions.

In the original plan I had pushed the lower level out by about a metre to accommodate a slightly larger garage. Well it turns out that if we want to do that we will be adding about four months to the approval process because we will need to not only apply to the Townsville City Council, but also to Townsville Planning, which processes it seperate from the Townsville City Council.

My original plan brought the left side of the house closer to the boundary line, and also changed the facade of the house, which is why it would require the additional approval. So I have had to modify the plans to keep it all under the original roof line, which pretty much removes all of the storage from the sides of the garage.

Waiting on Council

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All of the companies that do house lifting in Townsville have at least a two-month wait for lifting the house. Part of that is because the building industry in Townsville is extremely busy, but the other reason is because it takes the Townsvile City Council a minimum of 6-weeks to approve any projects.

So if we combine that minimum 6-week wait with the fact that it will be processed through the holiday season it’s hard to guess when we will be able to actually start the process of raising and restumping our house.

Why is my house only 5 feet above the Ground?

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While trying to find a contractor to raise and restump our house I found out some interesting information. A lot of the houses that have been built around Townsville have only been built 5 feet above the ground. This has always confused me because that was too low to actually build in under.

I found out that Townsville had a flood in the 1940s where a lot of the lower subburbs were under 5 feet of water. Because of that a lot of the houses around town were lifted to 5 feet and a lot of new ones were built at that level.

Our new house, which was built around the 1930’s, looks like it was raised to 5 feet after originally being built. Our old house, which was built in the late 1940’s, was built about 6 feet above ground. Our new house is in quite a high area and flooding shouldn’t be a problem. Our old house was at a very low point and was very prone to flooding, which is one more reason why we are happy to move.

(Our old house was at such a low point that the Townsville City Council actually built a huge drain right infront of house with a pumping station attached to it to pump the water out of our suburb and into the flood plains.)