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A man who recently moved into a 20-year-old display home in Betoota Heights is coming to grips with our delightful desert climate this week as he begins seeing his breath hang in the air as he sits on the couch.
Darcy Rucklock made the move in from Noosaville earlier this year for work and was first worried about how hot it gets in Betoota. With the aircon set to 18 and a blanket on his lap while he watched the Boxing Day Test, the 44-year-old diesel mechanic was none the wiser about how thermodynamically sound his new home was.
It wasn’t until March when Darcy received a $3500 power bill that he decided to cut back on leaving the airconditioning on all the time. That was fine for late summer and early autumn but now that winter is just a few short weeks away, he’s beginning to feel the chill.
“I can see my breath hang in the air while I’m inside on the couch,” he told our reporter.
“I wonder why this house is so fucking cold. It’s fucked. I don’t want to put the heater on because it’ll fucken send me to the poor house it will. Plus, it’s just me here and I don’t want to warm the whole fucken place up with the ducted air con. It’s got me fucked.”
As part of a growing cohort of Australians who buy a property without having it inspected first because they get that rush of blood to the head because they don’t want to be left without a property because they don’t want to be a fucking loser and not have a property so they think fuck it I’ll just buy the cunt and hope it’s not completely fucked top to bottom, Darcy doesn’t know that the now-phoenixed builder that constructed most of the Betoota Heights estate cut a lot of corners.
Most of the houses were put together by an overworked and stressed building manager, who got external pressure to cut costs and deliver 45 new homes to market within a very small time frame and with next to no margin for anyone. So they found a bunch of illiterate subbies to do the best they could.
Darcy’s home is a glorified tent, according to local building inspector Simon Clarke, who told The Advocate that they should just put a length of good anchor chain between two D10s and pull the whole of Betoota Heights to the ground.
“They were done by the first incarnation of Hotondo, I think. It’s funny because ‘Hotondo’ is a Japanese word (ほとんど) for ‘Fuck it, that’ll do’ which is pretty accurate, I reckon,” he said.
“They’re made from sticks and cardboard. Honestly. It goes from the outside in. Paint, weatherboard, weatherproofing, MDF, Frame, bit of second hand insulation, frame, gyprock, paint. It’s honestly less than a school ruler thick. It gets up to 50 here in summer and down to -10 here in winter sometimes. These houses just aren’t up to it.”
More to come.
