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Here is one typical timber house, they are good affordable family houses that most small to average families own. Most of these houses are set on a block of land about 400 to 800 square meters, so, people can have their own small garden. In the front yard people plant flowers, in the back yard you can have a lawn, and a kitchen garden. So they are very popular.
These wooden houses need some care
Dear readers, in our previous articles we have talked about, the Queenslander house, which is a large house built for the hot and humid clime of Australia. Now we want to talk about the rest of the timber houses and their maintenance. You see, these timber houses need maintenance and care.
For those people that have not lived-in timber houses before, they should ask
questions about them before they get involved in owning one of these houses.
The first question that will come to their mind is: are these houses safe to
live in and how long these houses can last? And then, what maintenance they
require? So, let me try to explain this timber housing situation.
Timber houses need more maintenance than
masonry houses; because you need to paint them for the timber to last longer,
otherwise the timber on the outside walls will slowly rot away, but then, there
are also some advantages, because if you want to change something it can be
done easily and it is cheaper than if you have a masonry house, therefore, it
is a lot cheaper to do some alterations, so, it can work well after all.
Having said that we need to say that these
wooden houses are safe to live-in, but they have some problems of their own, apart that they need to be
painted for the external timber to last longer, they have some vermin enemies
everywhere in the houses, because the timber is more vermin friendly than
masonry and bricks and cement, but the normal vermin are not a big problem for
the house structure itself.
The greatest enemy of these wooden houses are
the termites, or white ants as some of us calls them; The white ants can
destroy entire buildings by eating the wood from the inside, a lot of times
people don’t even know that the white ants are there eating their houses away
while they are living in them; you see, unless you know what you are looking
for, it is hard to see any sign of them from the outside. So, one day suddenly
we find out by putting pressure on a spot where the white ants have eaten the
wood from inside, everything starts collapsing inward and where there was a
wall now there is a big hole.
Therefore, it is worthwhile to learn how to
recognize the signs if there are white ants; and call an expert to check the
building if you are going to buy it.
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How to defend our homes from these pests
The white ant problem
There are a few things that we can do to prevent
this pest destroy our homes; the first thing that we can do is to check that
there is a barrier that stops the white ants to enter your building, for
instance if your house is a high-set house on stumps, check that at the top of
the stumps there is a metallic ant capping; this metallic ant capping is
usually a large galvanized round dish or square of metal and it is bent down at
the edges so that any crawling insect will find it difficult to enter your
house that way; we hope you can see the picture? The ant capping prevents also
the white ants to enter through the timber stump itself, if the stump has been
infested with white ants, because when they reach the top of the stump, they
cannot eat through the metal capping and so they cannot enter that way, of
course there are a lot of different buildings and a lot of different ways to
set a barrier; but sometimes the white ants find their way around.
Now there are ways that we should be looking
for if there are white ants; here the first thing that we have to keep in mind
is that white ants eat everything from inside and they don’t like to be exposed
outside for long, so, the first thing one can do is to tap on anything that is
made of wood; if the wood sounds hollow then the white ants may have eaten the inside,
so, a complete check is needed to see what is the cause; another way to look
for white ants signs is that if they are forced to go outside to move from one
place to another, they will construct a tunnel, so that they can go up and down
without being seen, so, we must look for any of these signs anywhere under the
building. Experts have told me that the white ants need moisture, so, they have
to travel to the ground to get the moisture and then they go up again their
tunnel to eat the timber; now if the building is solid and there is no other
way for the ants to go up they will construct their tunnel from the ground up,
so, we should be looking for signs to see if there are ants tunnel constructed,
and if there are tunnels, it means that there are white ants, therefore you
need a pest control expert to poison these pests, and you need him fast.
In Australia this is the enemy number one of the timber houses, since they eat the timer. to see more details click on this link Australian houses in Brisbane, there are more details.
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Some natural enemies of the white ants
White ants have very few enemies because they
live and hide inside the timber, but there are some natural enemies in their
natural habitat, a couple of which are pictured here. As I said before, we need
to learn the signs how to spot the white ants, then do something if you find
that they are there, otherwise they could eat your house away quickly.
Hereunder we have pasted two links about
termites that Huber’s have written for you to check them out.
How to Control Termites Naturally
Good luck to all timber house owners.
Dear readers, my intention here is that I am
going to write several articles about houses, how to own them, how to maintain
them and how to build them, because that is what I have done during my life.
But first, let us talk about Australia and ask; is Australia the land of
opportunities? Where I will be talking about the opportunities that I had in
the house building industry. So, see you in our next article.
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This blog is, old man-lifeworks
These wooden houses need some care
IS TO BE CONTINUED WITH
Australia was the land of opportunities
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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