We have been looking at what kind of internal staircase to build into our house. The new internal stairs will be put in where our current office is and the will need to be a curved staircase with a landing in the middle. The space that we have for the staircase is actually quite small, so the stairs will need to be narrow.
We were considering two types of of staircases; an enclosed staircase or an open staircase. There were pros and cons for both: Continue Reading →
Since having our house lifted and restumped we have been fixing up the cracks in the walls and floor upstairs.
Today I fixed up another crack. This one was just above the window in the dining room. It was hidden behind the venetian blind top so I hadn’t even noticed it, but Tamara did and had it on our “honey-do-list”.
There is still some tiny cracks in some of the corners where things have shifted, but to fix up all of them I would probably need to repaint everything upstairs. So far I have not had much luck with spot touch ups on any of the areas needing cracks filled and new paint.
Continue Reading →
Tonight I got an e-mail from someone who is Renovating their Queenslander here in Townsville. They have enclosed underneath and are currently adding a bathroom, bedroom and rumpus room. They had a question though about what to do with the concrete stumps that are under the house holding it up.
The concrete stumps used under many Queenslanders are quite large and very difficult to conceal. The ones that we had at our old house were about 300mm x 300mm square (unfortunately the image on the right is the best I can find tonight). These stumps are quite ugly and can be difficult to work around while enclosing under. So what can we do with the concrete stumps holding up the house?
The solution that I suggested was to restump the house with new steel stumps, or even just the stumps that are in the way or too obvious. You can see them under our house in the story House Concrete Slab is Complete.
The new steel stumps are available in 75mm and 90mm width, depending on the load that they need to bear. The great thing about this size is that they can easily be concealed in walls, which are what we are planning to do under our house. It is something that you can attempt to do yourself if you are game enough, or the guys at Northern House Raising can also probably do it for you (they raised and restumped our house).
Some questions for you:
Your ideas would be appreciated and would help this person out with their own renovations.
We finally got the front stairs up on the front of our Queenslander.
What was supposed to be a one week project turned into a one month project. The specifications on stairs, especially the rise of the treads, has to be precise right down to the millimetre. Because of this it took our builder about 4 visits from his welder / boilermaker to get the rise on the second flight of stairs correct.
As you can see from the photos it’s a fairly complex design that actually consists of three different flights to get all the way up to the top floor. The original design was two flights of stairs with a landing between them, but the problem with that was that the bottom flight of stairs ran right into the driveway, which we thought was not very safe.
By going with this design it cost us a bit more money, but it gives us a safer design, especially for the kids.
Now that we have the stairs in we can finally stop using the dodgy set of stairs at the back of the house.
We will also be able to start to think about what we want to do with landscaping in the front yard of the house. Right now it’s just a dust ball, so we need to do something before the wet season comes.
We are also thinking about putting a fence between the driveway and the stairs, but we need to wait to see how much room we will actually have once the driveway is in.
