Costs & Hiring

A Ngaio couple asked me to look at a retaining wall on a section they were about to list for sale. The wall looked fine. What worried the eventual buyer’s lawyer wasn’t the wall itself – it was that nobody could produce a consent, a code compliance certificate, or so much as an invoice for […]

I once sat in on a driveway consultation in Brooklyn where the contractor answered every question with “don’t worry about that, we’ve done hundreds of these.” He probably had. But that answer told the owner nothing, and by the end of the visit neither of us knew where the stormwater from that new driveway was

A Karori owner once handed me three quotes for a bank stabilisation and path job and asked which contractor was overcharging. The honest answer was none of them – the three had priced three different jobs, because the owner had asked each contractor to “have a look and give us a price” without writing anything

Three quotes landed on the same kitchen table last spring, all for the same retaining wall and terrace job in Newtown. One was $18,400. One was $31,900. One was a single line: “Outdoor landscaping works – $24,000.” As the person the owner had asked to manage the job through to completion, my first task wasn’t

Two quotes came back for what I thought was close to the same job: a low block retaining wall near the back boundary, maybe fifteen metres long. One came in under $9,000. The other came in past $16,000 for what looked, on paper, like the same wall. I rang the second contractor half expecting to

The retaining wall repair I priced in Berhampore last month was never going to be a big job — half a day, a few treated sleepers, some drainage metal behind them. What took the homeowner three weekends and a trip to the tool hire place before he rang me was the fence panel next to

A weatherboard villa on the point in Devonport, maybe eighty metres from the water, had paint failing on the seaward wall within four years while the landward side of the same house was still holding up at year nine. Same paint, same painter, same year of application, wildly different result, and the difference wasn’t quality