Category Archives: Contractors

Where Did Everyone Go?

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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.

Security and Fly Screens

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Today we had fly screens and security screens installed on all the windows that we are keeping in the house. We are still waiting for the new timber window to come in for the lounge room and the three aluminium ones for the bedrooms. I wrote a bit about this in my previous post, Replacing the Upstairs Windows.

We talked to a few different companies around Townsville when we were deciding who to get to install our new fly and security screens and we decided to go with Garry Neven Blinds, which has about mid-range pricing but they also had more specialized screens that would fit better into our nice timber windows in the lounge room. I haven’t been over to check them out yet, but we will be heading over tomorrow morning, at which point I will try to take some photos of them.

We also got a “Super Mesh” screen installed on the front door. This is a security screen door without the metal grill throughout the entire thing. This is supposed to look better and hopefully not cover up the nice timber door that’s on the front of the house.

Here are the details for Garry Neven Blinds if you are looking for some good security screens here in Townsville:

Garry Neven Blinds
Awnings, Insect Screens, Window Roller Shutters
8 Vennard Street Garbutt QLD 4814
Tel: (07) 47289554 Fax: (07) 47289113

I don’t get anything from them for mentioning them, but let them know where you found out about them since they don’t even have a web-site at the moment.

2500 New Homes Built This Year in Townsville

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This year Townsville has seen about 2500 new homes built and has a population growth forcast at around 3500 people.

In the next 20 years the Townsville & Thuringowa population is expected to double from the current 140,000 to aroun 280,000 residence.

With a growth that fast I can only expect it to get even more difficult to find tradespeople to work on renovations as they will almost always prefer to work on new homes and developements over renovations…

Source: Townsville Bulletin – Houses mushroom on skyline

Renovation Budget

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Tamara and I have been trying to work out a budget for our renovation. With the house lifting we have so far got 4 different quotes. They have a variation of about 35% and they all seem to cover the exact same things!

Raising and Restumping our house will, we hope, be the largest expense for our renovation. After that expense the next biggest will most likely be our deck and actually enclosing and building under the lifted house.

I have found that there is no company that will give us an exact price for lifting the house. They will usually give us some estimates but it’s normally accompanied with the statement “There could be some variation in that depending on …”.

Because of that it is quite hard to budget for the steps that we need to take in our renovation after lifting. We need to start booking people now as the contractors are so busy in Townsville, but it’s hard to know how many steps ahead to book since we don’t actually know how much money we will have to work with.

I read a good article about budgeting finances and time for renovations. You can read about it here:

Housebuilder’s Update: On time, on budget