Most of what you saw would have been relatively new in terms of construction, and would probably have fitted into one of the rectangular configurations that were the trademark of operations like Planet Homes.
Planet wasn’t the only outfit in the residential construction caper, but they were one of the main players and offered a couple of basic variations on the same basic structure. Your options ran to two, three or four bedrooms with a choice of high, low or split level configurations.
Opt for a high set house and you could, should you choose to do so, opt for a full concrete slab underneath. Alternatively you could run to the other extreme and have a single section of concrete around the bottom of the back steps where you’d sit the laundry tubs and the washing machine or go somewhere between the two extremes according to what your budget ran to.
But heading along that street the first thing you’d have noticed was that high set houses tended not to have too much underneath. Fair enough, understandable, the astute and critical reader might say. These are new houses, built to the whatever point the budget could afford, and as people could afford to fill things underneath, they would.
Again, up to a point, the astute and critical reader would be right.
Transferring our attention to a much more established area in, say Hermit Park or Mysterton you’d spot something interesting among the impressive old Queenslanders along Ackers Street. You mightn’t have been able to see under the building, what with the lattice work that helped keep out the sun and the array of hanging baskets containing ferns and what have you, but there was still, basically, not much underneath those high set houses in a suburb that regularly found itself inundated in The Wet.
There’d be more underneath those old Queenslanders than you’d have sighted in Aitkenvale, but there wouldn’t be much that couldn’t be raised off the ground or carted upstairs if the water level started to rise.
As far as the houses were concerned, if they hadn’t been built to the classic Queenslander configuration with the core of bedrooms, living and dining room and the kitchen at the back surrounded by verandahs or enclosed sleepouts they probably started as the basic configuration of living space with the externals added as finances permitted.
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