Category Archives: Contractors

Find a Trademan Anywhere in Australia with BANGitUP Australia

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I just came across a service that appears to make it easy to find a builder or tradesman anywhere in Australia from one web-site. You write down your details, and a few details of the job, and the request is then sent by SMS to various contractors around your area.

The first three tradesmen to respond are then put on a list for you to look at and you can then contact them directly to organize a face to face meeting. None of your details are sent to them, it’s up to you if you contact them or not. The details that you get on the list includes references, which can be helpful.

They claim to have over 40,000 tradesmen in their database, so it looks like it should cover a lot of areas, and best of all, it looks like it’s free!

You can check out at BANGitUP Australia – Trade Select.

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…

Bad Townsville Contractors & Dismantled Deck In the Garden

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The contractors that we had hired almost didn’t the deck down in time from the old house. They didn’t show up for work on time and didn’t take advantage of the days without any rain to pull down the deck. Instead they left it to the last available three days when it was pouring rain (a very heavy tropic storm) to get done. Then they went ahead and told me that they had been out the night before until after 3:00am at the casino. It didn’t instill a lot of confidence…

Dismantled Deck sitting in the Garden Bed

In the end they delivered the pieces of our deck into our back yard on the last possible day. Although we had considered using them for the building that needs to happen under the house after it is lifted I have lost all confidence in them and won’t be hiring them, even if they come in with a very cheap quote. They could definitely talk a good game, but they just didn’t deliver.