The Initial House Move

Here’s some pictures of the fateful day. At several points I was convinced the house was going to fall off the trailer. Mainly because when they’d loaded the house on and started to pull, the front trailer wheel didn’t move, it sank into mud, which tilted the trailer rather badly. I asked one of the moving guys, how much can it tip before it falls off, and he shrugged his shoulders. I said, what do you mean, you don’t know?? And he said well, they’re all different. Brilliant. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I didn’t hang around very long, if it was going to fall off I certainly wasn’t staying to watch. If you want to see an enlarged picture of a tilting house, click on the “our house is tipping” photo. Fortunately, the house stayed intact – relatively. The tipping didn't do much for the rest of the stuff we left in the kitchen after the house mover's blithe assurance that there wouldn't be "more than a few centimetres movement either way", but grateful thanks go to Dave's mum for taking the time to package up all our crockery!

The New Deck

Next project was to rebuild the deck. Small house with 5 young kids and no outdoor area is not fun. Undying thanks go to Dave’s dad Ngati for his help – without him we’d probably still be building it. Personally I learned a lot, especially about making sure the decking is straight before nailing it down! Unfortunately, a lot of what I learnt was after I'd already nailed it. We were re-using our old hardwood decking turned the other way up. Pulling it up wasn't an option, so some of the deck isn't quite as straight as it might have been. Oh well.

The Dreaded Drains

Then came the drainage and the overland flow path. Yes there were times I deeply regretted starting this whole process, and this was one of them. The overland flow path turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. We had to take out a mountain of soil that was higher than the deck railing by the time the digger driver finished, pay for it all to be dumped, then pay for gravel to fill it up again. The whole overland flow path cost us an extra $10,000 (NZD) although some of the costs were hard to quantify as they were tied up with the drainage and laying of new services.

Our New House!

Initially we were considering employing builders on a labour only contract and finding the subcontractors ourselves. While we did use some of our own subcontractors, I’m glad we didn’t attempt the whole project by ourselves. The builder we employed to construct the new house was absolutely fabulous. He has excellent tradesmen in his team. The foreman who was in charge of our site was top quality, and made our building experience positively pleasant.