Week 2: She's up!

This week was a big week for the West End reno. On Monday - the house was lifted! Can't wait to get up there and see what our views will be like when the scaffolding goes up. I've attempted this with a phone and a selfie stick previously but nothing like getting up there for real. I suspect we'll get a great view of Mt Coot-tha and possibly some city glimpses (thanks to 1 William St for going so high).

We've been planning this renovation for a year, so it's been exciting to see some real movement on site!

Firstly the house raisers installed some structural steel on the underside of the house, and then jacked it up, putting it on what looks a lot like temporary jenga blocks...

The next step was to drill some holes (bored piers) in which the steel posts were placed along with reinforcement, and the holes filled with concrete. This basically re-stumps the house and allows the jenga blocks to be removed (once all the posts are in and the concrete is set). The house will 'drop' a couple of centimetres onto the top of the posts.

Michael has some questions about how things will proceed from here as our site still needs to have fill imported to enable it to be levelled. He has also been keeping a close eye on the engineering details as per the structural drawings and will check with our builder that this part is all going to plan.

So what did we learn this week? Probably the biggest thing was getting the services disconnected in time for the house raise. While we had the builder's electrician come in to disconnect the electricity and gas from the house, the service itself to the house has to be switched off. Our tenants had moved out and therefore Energex had disconnected the electricity at this stage.

The gas turned out to be a little more difficult. The gas distributor (who owns and maintains the network and pipelines) in the south of Brisbane is Allgas, part of the APA group - https://www.apa.com.au. When I rang them however, it turns out that all inquiries go through the gas supplier (in our case, AGL). Once we contacted AGL, they contact Allgas, and they turned up only a couple of days later to remove the gas meter and supply line from the street (only around $64, and to reinstate a gas line/meter in QLD is free!). However we had been warned that disconnection (what the gas company calls 'abolishment') can take up to 20 working days so we were fortunate.

Services can be a real problem when raising a house, take a look at these FAQs from Raise My House here: (note that this is not the contractor that our builder is using, however I obtained a quote from them and their service was very prompt) http://www.raisemyhouse.com.au/faq/

In summary, lots happened during week 2 and we are cautiously excited! Thanks for reading, and pop any questions or comments below :-)