Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

10 Advantages Of Curtains Over Blinds

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As we are hopefully moving closer to the time that we will actually be able to move into the ground floor of our house we are starting to think and talk about our window furnishings.

We have been quite partial to timber venetian blinds as we had them in our first house, and have them on all the windows upstairs in this house. That said, there are some things that we don’t like about the horizontal timber venetian blinds, and we have thought about what we might be able to do instead.

While looking around for some ideas I read the following article, which has some great points about 10 advantages that curtains have over blinds. I hope that you find it interesting as well:
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Our Garage Sale in Townsville

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We ran a garage sale here in Townsville a few weeks ago and the response that we had to it wasn’t as good as what we were hoping for. It was better than our first garage sale at our previous help, but still not very good.

Tamara’s parent’s had run quite a few garage sales down in Adelaide, and the garage sales went really well in Adelaide. I remember running some garage sales in Calgary during their community garage sale weekends, and the garage sales in Calgary did fantastic, although us kids normally ended up buying more stuff at other garage sales than we sold at ours.

One note to look out for though is watch out for rip off artists trying to find bargains at your garage sale!

While I was upstairs at one point a guy came around the garage sale and had a look at a security system from our previous house. I know that the security system was complete, and working well, as I removed it myself from our other house, and we were using it up until when we moved out. The conman said that it was missing parts (a circuit board) and got the security system for half the price (remember, I was upstairs).

I honestly can’t understand what goes through someone mind to convince themselves that to save some money it’s okay to lie through their teeth! The guy probably does it every weekend, and then resells what he buys. I hope he doesn’t come around to any future garage sales that we run in Townsville.

We will probably be running another garage sale this year in Townsville, but we are also looking at using ebay.com.au for some of our smaller items to see how we go on there.

Special thanks goes out to Tamara’s parent’s for all their help on this garage sale.

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Skilled Trades Shortage Driving Costs Up

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According to an article in Friday’s Townsville Bulletin the areas worst hit with a trade skills shortage are:

  • Regional Queensland
  • Brisbane
  • Adelaide
  • Perth

On my previous article Renovate in Townsville Townsville in 2008 I had written on how hard it will probably be to find skilled trades for renovation work. According to the article the Housing Industry Association of Australia found that all 13 residential construction trades are in short supply, with all of the skilled trades indexes currently in the negative.

Lynette from The Road to Amherst blog is looking at needed some skilled trades in regional Victoria. I don’t know specifically how the trades shortage stack up there, but she reckons, as a lot of other people probably do, that DIY and Owner Builder may be the only way to get things done in the current building climate in Australia.

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Renovate in Townsville in 2008

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From everything that I have read and heard renovating in Townsville in 2008 will continue to be a challenge for home owners.

Most quality builders in Townsville are booked well in advance, and the costs involved with renovating in Townsville continues to escalate. In October 2007 our builder was already booked until July of 2008.

A standard carpenter’s rates right now in Townsville is up over $55.00 per hour. Our builder tells us that if a half decent carpenter isn’t paid that much, then they will move on to another job that will pay $55.00 per hour or more.

The rising cost of materials will also continue to drive up the costs of renovating.

Many of the larger building projects in Townsville are being either cancelled or postpones primarily due to a lack of tradesmen. The lack of trained tradesmen is no longer just affecting the small home renovators, but it has reached a point now where it is affecting everyone, including the large developers.

In the lead up to the national election last year here in Australia there was a lot of talk about the lack of affordable housing. There was a lot of discussion about releasing new lands, but I didn’t hear much talk about training up new tradesmen, or importing the needed skills. In North Queensland I reckon that bringing in those skills is what is needed to help alleviate the housing shortage.

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