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This type of houses were being built in the sixties, they could have been low-set or high-set. Today this house has been raised and renewed. You see you can do a lot of things with these timber houses. You could even move them to another address.
Welcome to our
article,
Building houses in the sixties
Dear readers, when I came to Australia in the sixties, I ended up working in the building industry, we were working mainly on fixing old houses, or building new houses from scratch, units and warehouses, so, I ended up learning how lots of building things were done, in the end I became a bricklayer, and have worked most of my life as a bricklayer. So, later I am going to write a few articles about, D.I.Y. Brickwork. So, this is the last blog that I label as Frank life story, our next blog will be labelled, D.I.Y. building works.
We believe that the Australian housing and building industry, is one of the major employment industries in Australia, you can say that this is so in other countries. But I believe that in other countries building new houses is not as important as it is in Australia. One of the reasons for this is that Australia is a new country, and it needs emigrants. In the sixties Australia was taking emigrants in a regulated way, now because the population was growing steadily also accommodation needed to grow steadily, therefore, new houses were built to keep a steady balance. This building of new houses gives opportunities for the newcomers to be employed, since there is manual work involved, therefore, a healthy cycle is created; but even with these opportunities the building industry has its ups and down, as we know. So, let us talk about it and try to make sense, if we can.
Working in the building industry
As I have said, when I came to Australia from Italy, I ended up working in the
building industry. Now let me explain this working position, working on
building in Australia is a temporary job, because even the employer is subject
to the same opportunities of work and he cannot help it, therefore, one is
never sure what is going to happen next, when the job you are working on is
finished, therefore, there were concerns about our employment status, so, we
kept asking ourselves, whether our employer would get another job to do, before
we finished the one we were doing, but even though we were thinking that, we
still worked hard to finish the job on hand, as soon as possible, because to
find work you had to be competitive.
Well I should say that although this small Italian builder did lots of small jobs, it did work out all right most times, so, we were able to move from one job to another all-around Brisbane and to other close by town/s. Of course, this would cause worries if you had no transport of your own and you had to rely on some friends or the employer to take you on the work site, where the building was going to be built, but we managed somehow.
Anyhow, it was a good job with good opportunities to learn and improve your knowledge of building something yourself. You see, in those times we could improve our working and earning position more easily than today; it was possible then because a lot of things were simple, and therefore, they could be done just by using your common sense. Of course, there were always inspections from local authorities to follow, but once you knew what it was required they were easy to follow, if you used your brains diligently, therefore, we should say that we had more opportunities then compared to today opportunities. I believe that it was so, because the building we were building were small houses, so, if you were a tradesman, you most likely could be the builder as well.
Learning how to earn and save money
Whatever you do in
life, the most important thing is; Earning and saving money. In my case,
because there was uncertainty of not having a permanent job in the building
industry, we soon learned that whatever money we earned from our job, we had to
save some, otherwise we could have problems soon or later; so, this
disadvantage that we had in this job pushed most of us building workers to
become good at saving money, because we wanted to feel safe and independent.
So, let me talk about money. In Australia because the economy is based on capitalism the more money you can earn and save the better off you are; of course, this is also true to most other part of the world, but in Australia seems to be more so, because it is a new country, and people rely more on what they can earn than anywhere else in the world. This is because there are not existing reach families that live on the earnings of the properties that have been passed down from generation to generations. Therefore, in Australia is mostly up to yourself, if you want to get richer, you should try harder to earn and save money.
Anyhow, I believe
that I have said enough about this money business; so, let me go back to tell
you, my progress in the building industry and what I did to become a tradesman.
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Working for this builder
Working and learning with this small Italian builder
Now let me go back to when I started work
with this Italian builder, who was a bricklayer and concrete worker, we were working
on houses and because there was not enough bricklaying work on these houses, as
they were mostly built with timber, we were building only the foundations, the
concrete stumps and some brickwork as the base of the house. Of course, we did
also some jobs under the existing houses and this has given me an opportunity
to learn many things about those old houses in Brisbane.
Anyhow, let me describe what we did to prepare a base for a new timber house, which would be setting on concrete stumps and some brick walls. First of all, we went to set up the site, if it was not set up from the builder or carpenter that was building the timber house. This setting up required that we should fix some timber frame to the ground with pegs and per the measurement in the plan. These timber frames are called profiles, and they are marked accurately to the measurement on the plan, so that we had the right measurement to go by, to start digging the foundations for the stumps and brick walls.
Then we had to dig the foundations and this was mostly my job as I was the labor and I was pretty good at digging, this may seem hard to believe but even digging one has to be an expert to do a good job, as the shape and depth of the foundations is important to do a good job. Just to show you what I mean to dig a hole for a new concrete stump, 20x20 centimetres as most stumps were supposed to be; the hole for this stump should be in exactly the right place, it should be at least sixty centimetres deep in natural ground and at the bottom should have a circumference of at least 40 centimetres or more. These were the average specifications then, unless it was stated otherwise. I know this because I have dug several hundreds of them if not thousands.
Now, I believe that I have said enough in this shortened article, if you want to know more you can link to this article, Australian building industry.
See you in our next article, which is going to be about working and building affordable houses.
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This blog is, old man-lifeworks
The Australian building industry
IS TO BE CONTINUED WITH
Building affordable houses
See you soon.
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https://sites.google.com/site/menfrancoreconciliation/
https://sites.google.com/site/prayersofreconciliation/
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