Didn’t you just move?

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This is the question that I was asking myself this weekend as I moved everything out from under our house to put in a friends shed while our house is being lifted and then enclosed under. It took us about seven loads in a small trailer and my station wagon to get most of it over.

We still have a lot of questions about the process of having our house lifted and will affect a lot with how we prepare for next week when it will be happening. We are going to be taking down all of our pictures and stuff from the walls, but I don’t know if I need to go as far as removing the books from the bookshelf, if you know what I mean. We are going to try to organize a meeting with the contractor doing the raise and restump and then find out some more details.

I am hoping that while they do the lifting that I will be able to head over there at least two times a day to take photos. It’s going to be a pretty cool process I reckon watching them lift the house, and I don’t want to miss it. I’ll try to post the images up here as well. The first day they will be knocking out all the old walls and removing the old slab from under the house, and then after that they will be starting the actual process of lifting…

Thankfully we have been able to find accomodation while we are out of our house for a week. We will be staying in some of our guest accomodation with where I work, Reef to Outback. All of us will be sleeping in one room with us actually sharing the flat with another couple who are here for a course that we are running, but it sure beats having to stay at a hotel or caravan park.

The Renovation Bug

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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

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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!

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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…