Slopes & Earthworks

A Mount Cook property I managed renovation works on had a freestanding brick pillar holding up one end of a pergola, built sometime in the 1960s with no visible reinforcing and no connection to anything below it. It had survived every wind storm the site had thrown at it. What made the engineer stop and […]

The first deck I paid for on this section had piles that were barely 400 millimetres out of the ground, and it never gave me a moment’s trouble. The second one, off the back of an addition, needed piles closer to two metres to reach level ground below a bank, and within a year of

The first path I put in on this section ran straight down the slope at what felt like a reasonable angle, from the top of the drive to the back door. It felt fine in the way a driveway feels fine when you are walking down it upright and paying attention. It stopped feeling fine

We opened a batter on a Brooklyn job in dry weather and it stood at a steeper angle than the drawings called for, clean and firm, for the better part of a week. Nobody touched it during that week. Four days after a 60 millimetre rain event, with the excavation still sitting open over a

Before my crew puts a digger on a Karori section, I walk it first, on foot, usually twice — once straight after we are asked to quote, and again the morning we are due to start, because a wet week in between can change what the ground is telling you. The section that sticks in

The shed behind a Frankton bungalow looked like nothing much — corrugated sheeting, a dirt floor, the kind of structure most owners would happily throw a skip at and forget about. The corrugated sheets were fibrous cement, though, and a scratch through the surface layer with a screwdriver was enough to make the demolition crew

The section in Petone had a falling-down timber shed, a concrete washing line base, and an old oil tank half buried near the back fence — the kind of leftovers you find on flat river-mouth land that’s been through several owners and at least one prior industrial use. The earthworks contractor wasn’t willing to bring