ALL SYSTEMS GO!
With a li le trepidation and a lot of excitement, the build begins.
Our homeowners Oliver Driver and Ella Mizrahi have taken their time to get their planning right. It’s three years since they committed to buying a small subdivided section near the water in Auckland’s Te Atatu, but after lots of back and forth with their architect their plans are finally perfect and they’re ready to send in the diggers.
e section has been cleared, a surveyor has been in to place marking pegs where the corners of the house will be and the builders have set up profile lines showing the correct levels for the build. With years of planning and tens of thousands of dollars at stake, Oliver and Ella are understandably feeling a little anxious in the days before the foundations go in.
“e big first step is the earthworks and we won’t know until we’re doing it whether that will be yet more money,” says Oliver. “It’s the only part of building a new house that’s a mystery. When you do renovations there’s that scary part where you go to replace a tiny bit of the deck, then you open it up and find you need to replace the entire deck because everything’s rotten. In new builds, the last scary moment is the earthworks – because who knows what’s under there.
But once that’s done and the foundations are complete then it should all be pretty quick.”
Builder James Hosking says foundations are difficult to schedule because the job is so weather-dependent, and the riverside My New Home site has unique challenges because it is boggy, with a very high water table. is means the piles have to be much deeper than usual to make sure the house is on solid ground. “Normally we’d use 900mm piles, but here we’re using 3.6 metre piles,” he says.
e site also has the added complication of having a council sewer line running through it, so this is one dig that will need to proceed very carefully!
Happily, James’ well-laid plans make the very busy dig day run smoothly.
“It was crazy here,” he says. “We had the digger to dig the holes for the piles, a hydro excavation truck to put a big hose down and suck up the water from the holes and six builders to get the 25 piles in and braced up and plum. Everything then had to be checked by a geotechnical engineer and structural engineer and Auckland Council before we could bring in the concrete pump and concrete the piles in.
It was very stressful but it all went really well for something so complex,” he says. “We were stoked.”
Still more, deeper piles were driven directly into the earth by a huge pile driver.
“A er a lot of back and forth, their plans are finally perfect and they’re ready
to send in the diggers”
Next, under the guidance of site foreman Mana McKenzie, the team from JR Hosking Carpenters put down bearers and joists for the floor framing, followed by high-density Strandboard wood chip panels for the subfloor.
ere’s only been one hitch in the giant online spreadsheet James has created to guide the six-month build. e wall frames, which he initially planned to have pre-built off-site, will now be built on-site. “ere was going to be a delay,” says Mana. “So we decided to do it ourselves.”
e job is like a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, as the team make the sections of wall frame lying down, then stand them up to fit them together. “e doors are all 2.4m high because Oliver’s so tall, so it will feel a bit grander than your standard home,” says James.
Once the giant roof trusses are craned into place, the form of the house begins to emerge. “We’re out of the ground, and it’s super exciting” says Oliver. “We’ve been a bit freaked out. I’m not very good at looking at two dimensions and imagining three, and neither is Ella, so while we were planning we had to draw out the entire house on a tennis court to understand what it would be like. But now we can really see how big everything is and that it’s a good-sized home.”
It’s important to this creative couple that theycan work from home, so Oliver paid a visit to the Chorus Fibre Lab in Auckland to find out how to get connected.
Chorus tech expert Kurt Rodgers says it’s a good idea to talk to Chorus very early in the new build process, so if fibre is available in your neighbourhood you can get it delivered from the street to your site efficiently.
“If you’re putting in a new driveway we advise to have a telco duct laid at the same time,” he says.
Fibre is available at Oliver and Ella’s Te Atatu site, but Kurt recommends that homeowners wire their new home to cope with the highest level of technology, even if they can’t connect to it immediately. “It’s all about futureproofing,” he says.
“Fibre and ethernet cables are all you need to worry about, then you can choose what you want to add on later.”
“Fibre is just as important as power,” says Kurt. “It’s the fourth utility, just like electricity, gas and water, so you have to consider it from the early planning stages of your build.”
Kurt recommends asking your electrician to install two ethernet jackpoints in the living area, kitchen, main bedroom and study, then if you need more than one wifi router you can plug them in wherever you go. “Every room should have power sockets, a couple of USB sockets and a couple of ethernet ports,” he says.
“Once you’ve got those it’s really easy to add things in, like wifi hotspots so you can stream anywhere in the house. en there’s no need for satellite dishes, aerials or lots of ugly cables everywhere.”
Oliver and Ella are also being kept busy making hundreds of decisions about the furnishings and fittings in their new home. ey’ve been working on their kitchen plans with John van Doormaal from Innovative Kitchens for more than a year, refining their layout as their vision for their new home becomes clearer.