These were the words of our four year old son the other week. He was only repeating what Tamara had been saying, but it has been true for us in the last few months.

Our house has completely consumed our family.

Our weekends are no longer our own. Our spare time is always spent on our house and our relationship with each other and with the kids is suffering.

We feel right now like we are at the end of our tether.

1. Our contractor has verbally confirmed that we will be dissolving our contract, but has still not gotten the letter to us to finalize it and he is not answering our phone calls or returning our messages. Until he does this (been waiting for three-weeks now) we can’t move ahead with anyone else, or even doing stuff ourselves.
2. What was meant to be “temporary” plumbing and gas fittings is now going to have to be make semi-permanent as it will probably take us over a year now to get someone to replace our builder based upon most builder’s waiting lists.
3. Our deck is still sitting a pile of timber and metal in the back-yard waiting to be erected. I really don’t want to see that timber rot, or the metal rust if it sits there too long.
4. The timber yards are closed until the 8th of January, so even if we could do something ourselves we might not be able to get timber for it. Steel, for the deck stumps, will take even longer.

Right now we are considering putting a hold on our major renovations. The plans for council are valid for six-years, as is my owner-builder license. This means that realistically we can put it on hold for quite a while before we move ahead with things, and we can also take our time and not rush the project and put too much pressure on ourselves.

At the moment we are not really sure what to do with everything. Thankfully there hasn’t been too much talk about walking away from the house and selling, but for us to continue down this path won’t be good for our family.

Any advice from other DIY renovators would be appreciated…

While searching for a place that sells new louver windows in Townsville I came across a great site, full of information about renovations. The site is We Renovate Homes, and it is a company in Brisbane that provides DIY advise for people in the process, or thinking about renovating their homes.

Because the site is based in Australia, unlike most DIY sites, the information is very relevant for us. My favourite area on the site is their DIY Renovation Articles. They have almost three years worth of articles up there, so it is well worth having a look at them.

I reckon that this is a fantastic site showing off how, by providing free information on their web-site, they increase We Renovate Homes profile, their credibility and their business. If I were in Brisbane I would be very tempted to pay them a visit to answer a lot of my questions about my own renovations. Given what information they give away for free, their paid information must be pure Gold, especially considering the challenges that we are going through with our renovations (did we mention that our builder quit?).

I know, it’s crazy that I get excited about Bunnings (like Home Depot) getting more shopping trollies, but when you spend as much time as I do there, this is an exciting development.

The previous trollies were pretty horrible things that usually had a mind of their own and were exactly the same as a supermarket trolley. The new ones were actually designed for a hardware store, which made it easy to fit a new toilet on the trolley last weekend, something you couldn’t really do with the old ones. Also because they are new they actually go where you want them to, which is a real bonus.

I know, it’s pretty sad that I’m this excited about using a new trolley at Bunnings, but I’m sure that I am not the only one…

In the beginning of the year I signed up for ADSL2+ for our home. ADSL2+ can theoretically give us 20Mbit download and 1Mbit upload. Up till now we have been using dialup, which is a bit painful.

We got a phone call yesterday telling us that they had finally set-up the telephone exchange to handle ADSL2+ and we could go down and pick-up the modem when we are ready to. I am thinking about doing that before lunch today, but it may need to wait until tomorrow.

We went with a company called Regional Internet Australia, or RAWNET. The have wireless and ADSL2+ packages, both of which are being sold by quite a few re-sellers around Townsville at the moment. The broadband Internet packages have no contract and comes with a free wireless router. The no contract thing could be good because we can leave at any time, but it could also make it real easy for them to up the costs and change the contract if they want to.

The broadband package that we got was only $25.00 per month for 5GB downloads, which is way cheaper than most of the other options available here. We worked it out and we think that it may even be cheaper than dial-up because we have to pay $0.15 for local phone calls here in Australia. If we find that we are needing more than 5GB we can also upgrade to the 20GB package for only an extra $10.00 or so per month.

Now all I need to do is get my deck set-up so that I can sit out their with my laptop and enjoy the speed with wireless. Of course, I’ll also need a laptop that has more than 5-minutes battery life, but that’s another story…