FAQ’s
Too many times we have heard a potential client say they have ignored the problem for years. Don’t bury your head in the sand. Building issues only get worse with time and end up costing you more.
If your home has been well maintained and you have caught any early signs of water ingress, then targeted building repairs may be the corrective solution you require. If you leave the problem to escalate, then it may well grow into a situation that requires a full reclad solution – see Reclad FAQ’s.
This is a very open-ended question and very difficult to determine, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution to fixing leaky homes. Every home is unique in its own right, will have its own unique problems, and more often than not there may be multiple solutions. By and large, we have found targeted building repairs to run anywhere between $10,000 plus GST to $200,000 plus GST.
If you are looking to spend north of $200,000 on remedial building work, you may begin to question if you’re better off biting the bullet and carrying out a fully consented full or partial reclad. This will of course be dependent upon your home’s design, circumstances and limitations.
This is very much dependent on the scale of the building project. In our experience, and for the majority of the homes we’re called upon to assess, building repairs can be carried out over a two-to-four-week period.
Other determining factors are based on the amount of labour required for each project. If you required a couple of tradespeople to remove and replace joinery units, this will take less time and could be completed in a matter of days, whereas, if we provided a team of builders (and other tradespeople) to carry out a partial rebuild of an area of your home, this may take a couple of months.
Please consider, especially in this current economic environment, most building projects require products with longer than usual lead times. Normally, we will establish ourselves onsite and then return some weeks later once the products have been manufactured and are ready for collection or delivery.
That is a very good question. Our builders will return the remediated area we work on up to today’s building code requirements. However, where the existing (original) area of the home meets the newly rectified area of the home, this junction / connection becomes an area of contention.
Therefore, as we cannot guarantee what could happen beyond this junction of old meets new, we typically provide a 5-year workmanship warranty for the new area only.
Something else to bear in mind is the ongoing maintenance of the home once we have completed our work. If the home happens to be a rental, for example, and is not well maintained over many years, then any building failures would be the responsibility of the owner.
We cannot stress enough: your home in most cases is your largest asset and it should be loved and looked after properly. Maintenance, regular maintenance, and more maintenance, regular checks and inspections, a regular house wash, and checks of the home in between seasons when you would expect a lot of structural movement from hot and dry conditions to very damp conditions are vital.
On a case-by-case basis we can determine very quickly if the scope of work requires a building consent or not.
If it falls under the category of repairs and maintenance, like for like, then a consent will not be required. However, this is a grey area, especially when dealing with Auckland Council: when does a small repair become a large repair and eventually a reclad?
As mentioned in one of the answers to our FAQs above, when remediating an area of your home, where old meets new, the junction between the two becomes an area of contention. If the remediated area continues to creep in size to the next logical breakpoint in the structure of the home, then the targeted repair is heading towards a partial reclad.
The most important factor is determining the scope of work upfront. From this point we can discuss the pros and cons between targeted repairs versus consented works.
It can be a long and drawn-out process from start to finish. With the planning phase, council consenting, moving out of your home during the rebuild, inspection after inspection, final sign off, and finally the ability to move back into your home, it will take the best part of 12 months.
