Category Archives: Planning

Great Australian Renovation Book

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As I’ve been planning for the renovations to our house I went out looking for a book about renovating here in Australia. There are a lot of books out there, but most of them are mostly relevant to the US market, rather than Australia.

Finally at a local book store I found not one, but two books specific to building and renovating in Australia! The first book was very specific to Townsville and new house building. The Townsville part was great because it dealt with a lot of the unique challenges that we have living in the topics, but because it dealt so much with new house building, instead of renovating, it didn’t work for me.

The second book, the one that I ended up buying, was called “Planning Your Perfect Home Renovation – by Alex May. The book was $26.95, but I had a gift voucher for $20.00, so it only cost me $6.95 out of pocket.

The book has great information about budgeting, planning, dealing with builders and tradespeople (which I need a lot of work on, basically I need to develop a backbone…), three different case studies and some useful money-saving and design tips. They cover the little jobs, like re-grouting the tiles, all the way up to basically gutting and rebuilding the home.

It’s a good book, and from what I have read and experienced so far in my own renovation journey, it’s a book that I would highly recommend to someone doing house renovations here in Australia.

— Update —

After I got on the Internet today I found a link to the web-site about the book. The Link is below:

Plans in to Council

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With the help of the contractor doing the house lifting we have now submitted our preliminary plans to the Townsville City Council for the raise, restump and building in of our house.

Our plans actually have to go through Town Planning despite us pulling our garage under the original roof line, as I wrote about in “New Floorplan for the House“. It seems that the house is less then the regulation 6 metres from the front boundary and even though we are not changing the location of the house Town planning still needs to see and aprove the plans. Bit of a pain but the house lifting contractor thinks that we should be able to have it through some time this week, which would be great.

We are still waiting on the engineering plans to get to us, but City Council doesn’t need that until Town Planning has approved it anyways…

Let’s just wait and see what happens this week.

Where Do You Live and Work?

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I read an interesting article on Houseblogs a while ago that I wanted to post about, but hadn’t gotten around to.

The article talked about how people are moving further away from work so that they can actually afford housing. My wife and I actually got lucky. When we first purchased our house we had to move outside of our ideal area in relation to my work and our friends because of finances. We basically got the closest house that we could afford.

As I wrote about in my previous post, The Street that Castletown Bought, we ended up selling our house to Castletown Shopping World, which we were living right next to. We managed to make enough on the sale of the house to move to within five houses of some of our good friends and only two blocks from my work.

Being this close to work and friends is probably the best thing that has come out of this move for us, even though in this settling stage there sure is a lot of work needed to be done to the house…

Here is a link to the Houseblogs article if you want to read about some of the housing trends in the US:

Overcapitalization vs. Life Style

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We are having to be quite careful we go about renovating our house. You quite often hear about this issue when you look at spending any substantial amount of money on a house, so I wanted to put down some of what I think about it here.

For us it’s a bit of a balance between overcapitalising and life style.  On our first house we spent about $20,000 on a deck that a few people, including my dad, told us was over capitalising.  I think that if we lived anywhere else other than in the tropics they would have been right.  Here in Townsville though the deck takes on the roll of a second living area and a true extention of our house, which is why we want to add one to the new house as soon as we can.  For us this is a big life style issue

If we were purchasing this house with the plan to be out of it within only a couple of years then our plans would be significantly different that what we actually have.  Our primary focus would be on getting the most financial return, or Return of Investment (ROI) for our money, rather than what we are going for, which is the best life style that we can have within our limited budget.

The article linked to below gives a bit of insight into what they think offers good return for investment with houses.

The ROI of Remodeling in 2005 | HouseBlogs.net