My other sites; http://frankmenchise.com,http://diybrickwork.com,http://manneedsgod.co.uk
Welcome to part one of my article,
Dear readers, we must say that we build houses to live in them, the houses we live in can be different, depending on the country or even the zone where we are living. Now let
me explain, any building that are meant for people to live in are called houses,
it is the universal name that most people accept, other buildings have
different names.
Anyhow, we must
build houses to live in them, so, in this article we are talking about that,
because this is what I did when I came to Australia in the sixties. I know that today building houses can be
different from then, but not very much. Anyhow, we are going to talk about
house brick bases, and working as a brickies labor.
So, we are talking about building house the old way, but it does not matter if it is the old way. House building in Brisbane in the sixties, was and is different from the old continent of Europe, because over there most houses are made of masonry, timber over there is more expensive than in Australia, and because of the colder climate. You see, thick walls of masonry absorb the heat during summer and act as storage of this heat by releasing it slowly during the colder months. Anyhow, houses over there are built mostly from masons’ bricklayers, and the carpenters play a smaller part than they do in Australia.
Therefore, when we the European migrants came to Australia in the sixties, we thought this is strange to live in timber houses, and we were surprised to see that the carpenter played the role of builders. But we accepted that and we did what we had to do in whatever employment we found, and those of us who ended up working in the building industry, we did what we were told to do. But as we know, everything changes with time. As we will see later, when building houses with timber will change even here. Now that we have made this comparison, let us go back to what I was doing myself in helping to build these houses; this help will become self-explained as we keep writing what we were doing. Therefore, let us talk about how most houses were being built by teams of workers, because that is how we were building houses in South East Queensland in the sixties.
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This is a typical timber house built on a brick base and stumps, it still had all the same features of the old timber house on wooden stumps, but it had also some living space under the house.
House building in Brisbane in the sixties
In the sixties and
seventies, most houses building were done from teams of subcontractors, who had
their own team of building workers, even if they were only a small team of two
or three people, like the team I was working with, which had two tradesman and
one labor (myself). Now let me go over
briefly what sort of teams were there; first there were the concrete workers and the bricklayers. When building small houses that did not have a lot to do with
these trades, concrete and brickwork could be done from the same team; then
there was the carpenter team, then the roof, the electrician and the plumber
and the plasters. The work of the builder, which most times was the leading
carpenter, because he had the largest job; not only he was building the timber
frame of the house, but organised all the teams in a way that was
appropriate, so that they were not in each other way while they were working,
and finally do all the finishing work required.
In those times to
be a builder of these standalone houses on an approved block of land was easy,
as long as you were a building tradesman and had building knowledge and had the
money to build them, you had this opportunity to build one of these houses, of course
there were local authority inspections to be had while we were building, but if
you knew what you were doing it was easy to pass. So, there were many house
builders around that would hire teams of building workers as we were.
I need to say that
the building industry in Australia is one of the main driving forces of the
economy, since it employs lots of people that are willing to do hard physical
work to earn their living, you see you don’t need to be a learned person to
work on the building, all you need is common knowledge of things and enough
English to understand what is wanted from you, if you know what you are doing;
or you work with people that speak your native language and they explain to you
what you need to do, but you had to work hard to keep this job.
I believe that in the sixties and seventies there were good opportunities to work on building houses, because the price of the houses was more affordable than they are today. Just looking back at those prices, we can say that one of those cheaper houses would be worth about four time the average wage of a person working full time for a year, so, most people could afford them; therefore, those builders that were building them were able to sell their houses at a decent profit that would enable them to build other houses.
Anyhow, things change, in the beginning houses in Brisbane were mostly made of timber, and they were set on timber stumps, then in the sixties because the timber stumps would rot or they would be attacked by white ants they gave way to concrete stumps, and some brick walls under the house. Then from just a brick wall in front of the house they changed to a full brick base and concrete stumps or steel posts, then came the era of the brick veneer and finally concrete and cavity bricks. Today, I must point out that building apartments is different from the sixties, they are mostly made of reinforced concrete.
Now that we have
said a few things about the history of house building in Brisbane, let us talk
about my contribution in the building industry and what I did during the
earlier part of working building houses. If I remember right in my last article,
I was talking about how we were concreting the stumps for a new house, and we
had laid the foundations for brickwork, therefore, let us talk about the
brickwork that we had to do, to build a brick base under the house.
I believe that this blog is long enough, so, we are splitting this article of, House building in Brisbane in two, so, see you in our next blog, working as a bricklayers' labor building a brick base. here we really start to explain how we work on building sites. So, the real D.I.Y. building work will start.
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This blog is, old man-lifeworks
House building in Brisbane explained
IS TO BE CONTINUED WITH
Working as a bricklayers' labor
See you soon.
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I believe that on the internet, it is helpful if we keep our personal links handy, so that we can visit our sites from anywhere we are. These links hereunder are some of my links, feel free to visit them.
https://sites.google.com/site/menfrancoreconciliation/
https://sites.google.com/site/prayersofreconciliation/
https://sites.google.com/site/godintheuniverse/
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