Learning how to earn and save money
Now let us go back to talk about money, as we were sating in our last post . 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. You see, most of the people here, have earned their own money.
Therefore, we must
understand that in Australia, not only you have to try to earn money, but it is
important that you should save it too, and at the same time you have to try to
improve your working position, so, you can be more independent and not rely on
others. This attitude can help if it happens that you lose your temporary job,
and also by saving money you can start one day buying your own house, which is
the most important thing that people must do, if they want to live an
independent decent life. I know now that most of you are saying that this
buying a house is a hard thing to do, but you see, this can be done because I
have done it myself.
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
Dear readers, in these articles, while I am
telling you the story about myself working in the Australian building industry,
I am going to try to give you details of how things were done in those days;
therefore, if you are one of those people that want to do your own building
renovations one day, on those building that we built then, you can somehow
guess what you can find, because you already know how we built them.
Now let me go back to when I started work
with this Italian builder, who did bricklaying and concreting, 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.
Just for comparison sake, to see the
difference between those times and today, let me describe to you what we did to
prepare a new 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 labour 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.
All the tools that I needed to do this
digging job were a pick a post hole shovel and a crowbar, it usually would take
me a couple of days to dig the entire house holes, which could usually be between
twenty and thirty holes. You see I was able to dig a hole in less than half an
hour, but it was hard work. Sometimes when there was some brickwork to do, we
had also to dig these foundations by hand; the foundations were usually dug
according to specification, which usually would be 60 centimetre deep in the
natural ground, this means that if the grounds had been filled up that filling
should not be counted as depth.
Anyhow, before I finish writing this article,
I want to say that those houses that we were building in the sixties, with this
builder contractor that I was working for, they were average affordable house
that the average family could afford to buy, and therefore, they were sold
easily.
Now, I believe that I have said enough in this article and although there is a lot more that can be said, we are going to tell you in our next article, which is going to be about how we made those concrete stumps on site, while we were working on these, Australia affordable houses .
See you soon.
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