Vandal rips near-finished house apart
A construction firm faces a total rebuild and a bill of more than $200,000 after someone fired up a digger and demolished a house overnight.
Workers arrived yesterday morning ready to put the final touches on a house at a building site in Flat Bush, Auckland, only to find the house had been smashed to pieces.
Someone had started up a 20-tonne digger left on the site and gone to town on a nearly complete house. Half the house has been torn down, leaving timber, roofing and other debris strewn across the site. The vandal also ripped up concrete foundations recently poured for other homes nearby.
The house has been irreparably damaged, so what’s left of it will have to be torn down and rebuilt, said Baljit Dheil, who owns the building company DDL Homes that runs the site.
‘‘We can’t digest it at the moment – it’s a whole house gone,’’ she said.
‘‘The house was ready to settle in a month’s time; now it will take us at least two or three months to rebuild. We have to demolish everything and start from scratch.’’
The kitchens and finishings had recently gone in, and all that was left was some flooring and painting, she said. She estimated it would cost them $200,000 to $300,000 to rebuild, but said it was too early to tell exactly what the final cost of the damage was.
The only positive is that adjoining houses were not damaged. Dheil said they would have to be careful while taking down the damaged house so as not to affect those still standing.
The damage was done some time between when workers left the site at 7pm on Thursday and when they arrived yesterday at 5am.
Police have been notified and confirmed they were investigating.