100% Pure New Zealand. A Kiwi build journey

Hello everyone, I have been member of this forum for few years but I always have been a lurker going through some amazing house builds of members in Australia. There is not an active community in New Zealand for new house builds like homeone so I have been gathering ideas and tips from the homeone community for past few years from various beautiful homes community members here have documented on this forum.

We are now ready to build our own home here in New Zealand and thought it would give my neighbours across the ditch a perspective about a new home build in New Zealand.

We bought the section in September 2018 from the subdivision developer and settled in November . During this one month gap, we gathered all our must haves, materials selection we had decided on and any wishlist to pass onto an architect that we hired to design us our dream home. After major issues at the local city council to get the consent plans approved and loads of $$ spent on engineering reports to supply to council, we finally got our approved building consent, 8 months after submitting it to council when at max it should take 20 working days. During the submission process of building consent to council, we had engaged 3 seperate independent building companies that are not franchises and only build bespoke homes to figure out who we would get with and their build price offer. This was a good experience as all three builders are good but we said no to one because their price came out quite high compared to other 2 builders. The winning difference between remaining two builders was that our chosen builder could start building for us quicker than the 2nd builder which we would have had to wait 5 months on for and our chosen builder works on cost + 8% basis so it is an open book contract where they supply me all the original invoices from their sub tradies and I pay them directly and pay the builder 8% margin on those sub tradies invoices. There are lot of tradies that we are going directly with that we are confident that we can project manage those easily to save the 8%.

Below is what our final plans are. The work was meant to start today in terms of digging the land but it rained all day so that did not happen. Our move in month has been advised for mid March but we realistically think it will be mid April. Good news is that day light savings is ending this week so tradies will work longer most likely due to more daylight.

The house is what you refer to in Australia in sq being 27sq where as in New Zealand we refer to it being in sqm which is 249sqm + 20sqm covered alfresco. Land size is 684sqm. One benefit you still see in New Zealand is bigger land size available although I have now seen 300sqm to 400sqm land in sub divisions now which are all filled with double storey houses.

We are looking forward to keep this thread updated as the build progress happens with photos and our materials selection and hopefully get more ideas from this community and answer any queries regarding our build or New Zealand building code like double glazing in window and door joinery being mandatory for all new builds since 2009.


 Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share


 Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share


 Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share


 Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share

 Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share