Category Archives: House Lifting

Renovation Planning Hitch

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I just got off the phone with the house lifting people today and the plan that I had drawn up for under our house has to go through some pretty major revisions.

In the original plan I had pushed the lower level out by about a metre to accommodate a slightly larger garage. Well it turns out that if we want to do that we will be adding about four months to the approval process because we will need to not only apply to the Townsville City Council, but also to Townsville Planning, which processes it seperate from the Townsville City Council.

My original plan brought the left side of the house closer to the boundary line, and also changed the facade of the house, which is why it would require the additional approval. So I have had to modify the plans to keep it all under the original roof line, which pretty much removes all of the storage from the sides of the garage.

Waiting on Council

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All of the companies that do house lifting in Townsville have at least a two-month wait for lifting the house. Part of that is because the building industry in Townsville is extremely busy, but the other reason is because it takes the Townsvile City Council a minimum of 6-weeks to approve any projects.

So if we combine that minimum 6-week wait with the fact that it will be processed through the holiday season it’s hard to guess when we will be able to actually start the process of raising and restumping our house.

Why is my house only 5 feet above the Ground?

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While trying to find a contractor to raise and restump our house I found out some interesting information. A lot of the houses that have been built around Townsville have only been built 5 feet above the ground. This has always confused me because that was too low to actually build in under.

I found out that Townsville had a flood in the 1940s where a lot of the lower subburbs were under 5 feet of water. Because of that a lot of the houses around town were lifted to 5 feet and a lot of new ones were built at that level.

Our new house, which was built around the 1930’s, looks like it was raised to 5 feet after originally being built. Our old house, which was built in the late 1940’s, was built about 6 feet above ground. Our new house is in quite a high area and flooding shouldn’t be a problem. Our old house was at a very low point and was very prone to flooding, which is one more reason why we are happy to move.

(Our old house was at such a low point that the Townsville City Council actually built a huge drain right infront of house with a pumping station attached to it to pump the water out of our suburb and into the flood plains.)

Lifting our House

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The largest project that we are undertaking with our house renovations is to lift our house. By lifting it we will be effectively doubling our available floor space. We have been talking to 5 different contractors about raising the house and so far the quotes have varied by about 25%! They all seem to offer us the same service, but there is a huge discrepancy in price.

When we have decided which contractor we go with to raise and restump our house we’ll post on here their details so that you have a good place to start.