Where Did Everyone Go?

Posted on by — 3 Comments ↓

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.

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

Posted on by — Leave a reply

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

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — 4 Comments ↓

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: