Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Free Ceiling Insulation for Australians

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I don’t know how I missed this, but the Australian Government is offering $1600 to all house owner-occupiers to have ceiling insulation installed. They estimate that it will save up to $200 per house in energy bills, and increase the energy rating of all Australian homes to a minimum of two-stars.

In addition to offering the $1600 to owner-occupiers the government is also offering a $1000 rebates to landlords to encourage them to install ceiling insulation in their rental properties.

Currently about 40% of homes in Australia and New Zealand are not insulated, with Queensland having the lowest percentage of insulation of any state in Australia.

Our house currently has a spray on reflective insulation on the roof, which we also had done to our first house which you can see here, spray on reflective roof insulation. This type of insulation works by reflecting the suns heat, but there is no mass of insulation (like your classic pink bats, or fibreglass insulation) in the ceiling, so the $1600 could be used to insulate the area over the core four upstairs room in the house, although it would definitely cost a lot less than that to do.

You can read more about the free ceiling insulation project from the Australia Government here.

Build a DIY Kid’s Kitchen from an Entertainment Center

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With my daughters birthday coming up I have had big plans to build her a kid’s kitchen. Unfortunately time hasn’t permitted me to do that, but in looking around I found a fantastic way to build a children’s play kitchen out of an old / unused entertainment unit …

DIY Kids Play Kitchen

They took an old entertainment unit and re-used it as a DIY Children’s Play Kitchen, which turned out really good I reckon.

At the moment I am going to start looking around for an old entertainment unit and see if I can pick one up. I think that I will start on Freecycle and then maybe look at Craig’s List and see what I can find. Someone out there is probably replacing their old tube CRT TV with a new flat panel and don’t have a use for their old entertainment unit.

Of course, that could all change if they have a young girl who loves to pretend to cook and they read this article …

You can read about how to build the kid’s kitchen here.

We Got Final Approval on the House Renovations

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After about four different inspection and a few visits to the Townsville City Council offices we have received final approval on our house renovations!

We mad a lot of changes to our plans since the beginning that called for amended plans. The first time I amended our plans and changed the lower level from block walls to timber walls it cost me about $800.00.

For removing the rear deck, “sister” joists, and knocking out an internal wall I chose to fall back on my high-school drafting classes and draw the plans myself. It took me a while to get everything drawn to scale and ready for submission, but I reckon I saved myself about $500 – $700 by doing it myself. Council had no problems with the plans, so I reckon my high school drafting teacher would have been proud …

Because I am an owner builder I also needed to write up and submit a number of the forms myself. This also took a while as I had to find sample forms on-line and make sure that I understood the legislation and building codes that I was referencing in the forms.

So now the house is finished and we are ready to move onto the next big thing …

Track Cyclone Hamish Progress on Twitter

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Tropical Cylcone Hamish Off the North Queensland Coast Cyclone Hamish has now been upgraded to a category 3 cyclone and is still tracking down the coast of Queensland. At the moment they are predicting that it will stay off the coast, but since cyclones are rather unpredictable we will have to prepare for the worst. It is set to be off the coast of Townsville about this time tomorrow.

An interesting way to follow and track Tropical Cyclone Hamish is using a service called Twitter.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to post short, 140 character posts to it’s service. One of the features that is has is to set topics to the short posts, which people up and down the Queensland Coast are starting to do with Tropical Cyclone Hamish.

You can follow people’s posts about cyclone Hamish on Twitter here.

If you are experiencing anything to do with the cyclone and want to post about it, just sign up on Twitter and include “#hamish” in your post to add to the topic.

Since it’s after mid-night right now in Queensland you can expect things to be quiet on that topic over night, but it will no doubt pick up again in the morning.