It’s a bit strange to find one of our old houses on-line and up for rent, but my wife found our old Queenslander in Townsville up for rent. It was up for rent for $650 per week, which is quite a bit really!

The inside of the house looks pretty much the same. They actually used some of the photos from when we sold our house for the online advertisement for renting our house this time. That was kind of weird …

Here are some photos of the backyard and the rear deck. They put a lot of work into the backyard including:

• New pool
• Back Deck
• Storage Shed (under deck)
• Removed all the trees
• Paved path

The main deck looks very similar to the one that we had originally planned except that they didn’t build the stairs and waterproofed it so they could have a shed and patio under it.

I love the back deck, it’s what I always wanted on the back of that house.

It’s a great size with a nice roof and space for a large table and of course the BBQ.

We aren’t really pool people, so we had never planned to put in a pool. Actually the pool is over top of the main sewer line so I didn’t even know it could be done.

Kind of neat to see what they did with the yard…

I am almost embarrassed to admit it, but Tamara and I were laughing tonight at a post we saw on Facebook from a friend in Australia commenting on how “cold” it was to barbecue in the “Australian Winter”…

I remember our Australian winters, they consisted mostly of winter days that were about as warm as a cool Calgary summer day.

It is certainly a big change cooking on the BBQ in the winter here in Canada. Usually it consisted of something like this …

A bit different than barbecuing in the winter in Australia, that’s for sure …

We added a deck safety gate to our front veranda to help keep the kids from falling down the stairs. The gate can also be locked for added security if desired.

I was lucky in that I had some railing left over from the old landing that was torn down when they lifted our house. I was able to cut that down to the width of the opening from our veranda to the new landing. On either side of the cut down railing I added a 2×4 and then added a diagonal support to help it maintain shape, since it would only be attached on one side.

For the gate latch I used a pool gate lock, which was easy to install, and makes it hard for the kids to reach the latch top open the gate until they are older and taller.

The gate is a bit of pain to open if I don’t have a free hand to pull the latch, but I figure that the added safety outweighs that little bit of inconvenience.

It was a sad day a few weekends ago when we finally sold our deck.

It took us almost two-weeks to sell the deck after we first advertised the deck for sale in the Townsville Bulletin. We had a lot of people call and say they were going to come, and not show up. We had one couple call, measure it all up, and then go home to check and never call back.

After the two weeks it took us to sell the deck, it then took almost two more weeks for the deck to finally be picked up. The heavy rains we had in Townsville managed to put a damper on that…

In the end we sold it to a fellow Canadian who is working in the building industry in Townsville. We got about a third of our asking price for the deck, which was disappointing to say the least. I don’t know if we got ripped off or not though, as I have yet to see another used deck advertised here in Townsville, and I didn’t have anyone around to ask for advise on the purchase price.

Our builder didn’t comment much on the price that we got for the deck. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

All I can say is that I will miss the idea of having a nice large deck off the back of our Queenslander. The money that we should save on putting it up the deck and building the roof will be put to good use as we continue to get the house finished off on the ground floor.