Consents & Rules

A Kelburn owner rang me the week after felling a large tree on the edge of her section, wanting to know if she needed to tell anyone. She did — after the fact, which is the worst time to find out a tree was protected. She had checked her building consent history, found nothing about […]

A Johnsonville owner once told me, fairly indignantly, that he did not see why the council needed to approve concrete he was paying for on his own section. He was half right. The driveway itself, back from the road, is his. The vehicle crossing — the stretch of kerb, berm, and footpath his car actually

I once had a builder in Newtown ring to ask if he could just send photos instead of booking an inspection, because the drainage trench was already backfilled. The answer was no, and it is always no, and that single fact causes more re-digging than anything else in outdoor construction. Council inspections exist to look

Two files used to land on my desk in the same week with almost the same question, and different answers. One was a Thorndon owner wanting to raise a battered bank behind a 1910s villa into a stepped retaining wall. The other was a neighbour three doors down wanting to remove a self-seeded macrocarpa that

A property in Johnsonville I inspected had a laundry outlet, a downpipe, and what looked like an old sink waste all joining the same underground pipe before it left the section. The vendor’s paperwork called it “stormwater.” One test with a dye tablet down the laundry tub said otherwise — the dye came up in

Two neighbours in Khandallah once asked me for two separate quotes on what was, as far as I could tell, one wall. It sat exactly on the boundary line between their sections, retaining the upper property’s flat lawn above the lower property’s driveway, and neither owner was quite sure whose problem it was when a