Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

PLANS to build a multi-storey apartment building on Mackay's riverfront have been resurrected.

Mackay Regional Council has received a development application for The Pier, a luxury residential and commercial complex on the old Seafresh site boasting 54 apartments and ground floor commercial space.

The development was given the green light four years ago but approval lapsed because construction on the $87million proposal had not commenced.

Brothers David, Graham and Brian Caracciolo are the people behind the project.

David Caracciolo said it could be some time before the first residents moved in.

"It would be nice to see it eventuate in the next five years," he said.

"But no date has been set for construction. All we are doing is renewing the application to keep the project on the drawing board."

Mr Caracciolo said he was considering the possibility of a joint venture.

"The Pier will be built entirely on pilings over the Pioneer River," he said.

"It's an excellent location. The Pier will be totally suspended."

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Pier project back on horizon

WASHINGTON (AP) Construction of new homes fell slightly in October after a big surge in the previous month, but the weakness was largely driven by the volatile apartment sector.

Builders started construction at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.009 million last month, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. That was a drop of 2.8 percent from September when construction had jumped 7.8 percent to 1.038 million.

The weakness stemmed from a 15.4 percent plunge in apartment construction, a category that tends to have big swings from month to month. Construction of single-family homes was up 4.2 percent, the third gain in the past four months.

Applications for building permits, a good sign of future activity, rose 4.8 percent in October to 1.08 million.

While overall construction was down in October, analysts said the weakness was confined to apartment building, which had seen a huge increase in September. They noted upward revisions to overall activity in September and August and forecast further gains in the months ahead.

The improving trend should continue, supported by generally low rates ... and strong job growth, said Jennifer Lee, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets.

Showing strength in October was the South, which posted a 10.1 percent jump on construction starts. All other regions of the country recorded declines. Construction fell 18.5 percent in the Midwest, 16.4 percent in the Northeast and 10.9 percent in the West.

Solid employment gains, lower mortgage rates and somewhat easier lending standards are likely to boost housing in coming months. At the same time, economists are concerned about price gains, which so far have been outpacing wage increases.

Price increases have cut into affordability for would-be buyers, limiting sales growth for new homes and cutting into sales for existing homes.

But in an encouraging sign, U.S. homebuilders confidence rebounded in November as both sales expectations and buyer traffic improved. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo index rose to 58 this month, up from 54 in October.

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Home construction drops 2.8 percent in October

CLIFFSIDE PARK, N.J. (CBSNewYork) A fire broke out late Tuesday in a multi-story apartment building that was under construction in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and spread to other buildings.

The fire broke out around 5:45 p.m. in the building at Walker Street and Cliff Lane, fire officials told CBS2.

Witnesses watched as windows flew off the building.

I was in my house and I heard two explosions. I jumped and looked out the window and I saw this building behind us engulfed in flames, Rick Ferrer told CBS2s Hazel Sanchez.

Nearby residents said explosions could be felt blocks away.

We just heard a big bang and shook kind of the whole house, Justin Martone said.

Strong winds fueled the flames which could be seen several miles out. Burning debris flew to neighboring apartment buildings, forcing several families to be evacuated.

Ive never in my life seen flames spread so fast, one witness said.

Multiple fire departments from the surrounding area, including the North Hudson Fire Department, were dispatched to the scene.

Fire officials said the gusting winds late Tuesday caused flying embers to spread the fire.

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Bitter Winds Blamed In Fire That Spread To Multiple Buildings In Cliffside, N.J.

The clean up is underway after severe storms uprooted trees, felled power lines, washed away cars and shut down Brisbane's commuter rail network.

The storms hit southeast Queensland late on Wednesday afternoon, bringing driving rain and powerful wind gusts of over 100km/h to some areas.

The two hardest hit suburbs were on opposite sides of Brisbane - the southwest suburb of Inala recorded 100mm of rain in one hour, while the northside suburb of Geebung was hit with 95mm of rain in one hour.

Heavy downpours flooded many parts of the city, washing away a number of cars, including in inner city suburbs like Bowen Hills.

Queensland Fire and Emergency Services told AAP swift water rescue teams were called to some reports of people trapped in flooded cars, but they managed to escape by the time crews arrived.

Emergency services received around 250 calls for assistance - more than 90 from within the Brisbane city area.

Energex recorded more than 16,000 lightning strikes and said at the peak of the storms 250,000 homes and business had power problems.

About 530 customers still didn't have power on Thursday morning.

Trains, buses and ferries were also disrupted, with hundreds of commuters forced to wait for hours because of flooded train tracks in some CBD stations.

Translink took to Twitter to announce that all rail, bus and ferry services had returned to normal on Thursday morning.

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Clean-up begins after Qld storms

A six-story building on Chicago's North Side once housed some of the city's poorest residents. Now it has been remodeled with granite countertops, stainless appliances and is marketed to young professionals with its "vintage" appeal. (AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser)

BETH A. KEISER, AP

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A high-rise near Wrigley Field in Chicago had tiny rooms with peeling paint, but it offered a home to those who were too poor to pass a credit check, save up first and last month's rent, or make the other stiff qualifications that make it difficult to get into housing in an urban market.

Now the six-story building has a remodeled entry with elaborate carvings. Refurbished studios boast stainless steel countertops and granite countertops, and rents are over $1,000.

The Washington Post reports that the Hotel Carlos, which once offered a cheap place to stay for poor residents, is just one of many in Chicago's North Side that are being snapped up by developers and converted from small, humble spaces for low-income residents, to upscale, "vintage" spaces for single, young professionals.

Gentrification often pushes people out slowly as rents and property taxes rise, but Chicago's disappearing low-income housing is much more direct as whole buildings are emptied out. Since 2011, more than 2,000 units have been converted into upscale apartments, according to The Washington Post report.

But as of last week, city councilmen passed an ordinance that would preserve single resident occupant housing. The move is an acknowledgment that these properties are a key asset in affordable housing, a shift from a few years ago, when councilmen were just as happy to get rid of them.

Ed Shurna, director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, told the Chicago Sun-Times that preserving SROs was vital for keeping people housed and maintaining diversity: More people would be thrown out in the street and become homeless and, in their place, wed have boutique hotels that are very expensive, he said.

Still, Chicago's affordable housing stock needs 3,500 more units to meet demand, he said.

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When low-income housing is converted into luxury apartments

DWINDLING BUDGET: Downstairs is almost complete - but it hasn't left much in the bank for upstairs.

Carpet or wardrobes? Which could you live without?

As we head into the final stretches of the ground floor phase of the project (three bedrooms and one bathroom), it's looking increasingly likely that we're going to exhaust our original $100,000 budget without even getting started on the top floor.

The builder's warned us from the start that our budget wasn't enough, and we're beginning to realise just how short we were.

MOVING UP: And down. Finally having stairs has made life a lot easier for moving around the house.

The luxuries are long gone the skylight, new furniture and the indulgent curtains and now we're beginning to question which conventional parts of the home we can live without for a while.

A colleague of mine has, along with her husband and teenage sons, been living through a similar situation for the past few months since they had to stop their new-home build without a kitchen.

But rather than despair, they set up a table, where the main bench would go, stored their food in boxes instead of a pantry, have been cooking meals on BBQ, and generally loving their otherwise perfect home.

WALLS: When they go up, rooms start to take shape.

In the meantime, her husband has been constructing the kitchen himself out of solid pine in his spare time, complete with quality German draw runners, for a grand total of $1500.

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Real life reno': Making sacrifices

Cant Stop Junk Removal Haul Job for Basement Remodeling
On this day, the Cant Stop Junk Removal team cleaned out an entire basement for a remodeling company. Just take a look, and we #39;ll be by the phone waiting for...

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Cant Stop Junk Removal Haul Job for Basement Remodeling - Video

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Houseplants are popular indoor decorations. Attractive and constantly changing, they add a softness of line and provide a bit of nature indoors. However, the ideal location of a plant for decoration may not be the ideal spot for plant growth. Lack of adequate light is the most common factor limiting the growth of plants in many areas of the home. Supplementary electric lighting is usually the easiest and least expensive way to provide enough light for plants that do not receive adequate natural light (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Artificial lighting, if properly designed, allows plants to be grown indoors in nearly any setting.

Light provides the energy plants need to make the food required for them to grow and flower. Plants are the only organisms able to use light to produce sugars, starches and other substances needed by them as well as by other living organisms.

Certain colors in light rays are important for proper plant growth. Leaves reflect and derive little energy from many of the yellow and green rays of the visible spectrum. Yet the red and blue parts of the light spectrum are the most important energy sources for plants, and plants require more rays from the red range than from the blue.

Plants growing outdoors, in greenhouses or close to windows are exposed to a natural balance of the blue and red light rays that plants need. Where plants receive little or no natural light, you must provide additional light from artificial sources.

As a single light source for plants, incandescent light bulbs are not particularly good. They are a good source of red rays but a poor source of blue. They produce too much heat for most plants and, if used, must be located some distance from the plants, thus reducing the intensity of the light the plants receive. They are also about one-third as efficient as fluorescent tubes in converting electrical energy to light. Furthermore, a standard incandescent bulb's life is often only about 1,000 hours, whereas a fluorescent tube's life is normally 10,000 hours or more.

Fluorescent tubes provide one of the best artificial light sources available for plants in the home. Other light sources such as sodium-vapor and metal halide lamps may be used but are not as readily available or adaptable for home use.

Fluorescent tubes are made in many sizes and shapes: circular, U-shaped, square or straight. Straight tubes in 2-, 4- or 8-foot lengths are used most frequently.

Many indoor gardeners use cool-white fluorescent tubes. Warm-white fluorescent tubes also seem fairly effective, but fluorescent tubes listed as white or daylight are less desirable for indoor plant growth. Cool-white tubes produce a small amount of red rays in addition to orange, yellow-green and blue rays. However, the red light produced usually is not enough for plants unless windows or other artificial lights produce additional red rays.

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G6515 Lighting Indoor Plants | University of Missouri ...

6 hours ago At low current the coated LEDs emit a cozy, warm glow compared to uncoated reference LEDs. Credit: Hugo J. Cornelissen

When the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded this October to three Japanese-born scientists for the invention of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs), the prize committee declared LED lamps would light the 21st century. Now researchers from the Netherlands have found a novel way to ensure the lights of the future not only are energy efficient but also emit a cozy warmth.

"We demonstrated a seemingly simple - but in fact sophisticated - way to create LED lights that change in a natural way to a cozy, warm white color when dimmed," said Hugo Cornelissen, a principal scientist in the Optics Research Department at Philips Research Eindhoven, a corporate scientific research entity owned by the company Royal Philips in the Netherlands.

Cornelissen and his colleagues from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands describe their new LEDs in a paper published today in The Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.

Incandescent lamps naturally emit warmer colors when dimmed, and Cornelissen said our general preference for redder colors in low-light situations might even have developed far back in time, when humans "experienced the daily rhythm of sunrise, bright daylight at noon, and sunset, each with their corresponding color temperatures."

LEDs, however, don't normally change color at different light intensities. Other groups have used multiple color LEDs and complex control circuitry to make lights that turn redder as the power is turned down. The added complexity comes with its drawbacks: multiple components can increase the cost and the risk of failure, and mixing the light from multiple LEDs without creating color shadows and other light artifacts is a tricky business.

The Dutch research team tried an entirely different approach to creating cozy LEDs. The scientists had noticed that when they embedded LEDs in coated textiles or transparent materials, the color of the emitted light would sometimes change.

"After finding the root cause of these effects and quantitatively understanding the observed color shift, we thought of a way to turn the undesired color changes into a beneficial feature," said Cornelissen.

Starting with White LEDs

They began with cold white LEDs, which can be made from blue LEDs surrounded by a material known as a phosphor. Part of the blue light is absorbed by the phosphor and re-emitted at a different color. The multiple colors combine to form white light.

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Giving LEDs a cozy, warm glow

Archmarathon: Zambak Architects + Corda - Jurtin Hajro

By: Archmarathon

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Archmarathon: Zambak Architects + Corda - Jurtin Hajro - Video