Last night, on Prime TV, there was a programme on living in apartments in NZ. Specifically, apartment hell living in leaking apartments and badly built apartments. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant doc, mainly because it had a maudlin speaker and poor sound quality, but I got the gist of it: NZ seems to be rubbish at designing and building apartment buildings. Some of the examples were truly shocking – with hundreds of thousands of dollars of repairs (per flat) or complete losses (ie knock it down or walk away). Others were less shocking: one guy said he had a maintenance bill of about $16,000 per apartment, which sounds like quite a reasonable, handleable problem to me, and probably something worthwhile as a maintenance cost for any homeowner. I mean, if you lived in Suburbia, you might pay that much for your house to be repainted.
There were examples from Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga, Christchurch etc: some real shockers. Unfortunately the programme didn’t really seem to go too much into WHY things were happening / buildings were leaking, but it was more on just what a misery it made the owner’s lives. Glad I’m not them! Roger Walker’s apartment block up behind St Mary of the Angels was featured in Wellington as a chronic leaker, and one of the ones with balconies that should not be used. I’m not sure if that was because they thought the balconies might fall off (that would indeed be a catastrophe if that happened) or if it was that the act of walking on the balcony might make the leak worse. Examples from Auckland seemed to show a city with an inadequate building staff problem (ie construction by untrained foreign manual labour workers instead of intelligent locals with training and skills and understanding). But even solid concrete buildings seemed to be leaking. Some real shockers, no doubt about that. Warren and Mahoney’s Altera block in Auckland’s grim Stonefields development was also heavily featured, with Fletcher Construction behaving very secretively about what the issues were. Still: $9m construction costs and $15m remedial work shows the size of the problem.
What are your experiences like with leaky buildings and dodgy construction? I’d be keen to hear your stories here. Anonymous forum right here: get it off your chest. Comments?
My husband and I bought a one bedroom apartment in Auckland off the plans in 1999. We lived in it for a couple of years, renting it out when we relocated, and sold it in 2003. A few months later it was found to be leaky. It has only just been reclad. I feel so sorry for everyone involved in that block. Many were young first home owners who would have suffered financial hardship as a result.
Quest Atrium on The Terrace is the dodgiest I’ve heard of- from what I have heard I wouldn’t set foot in the place lest it crumbled down if a cat farted at it
Stratum build good apartments and have a good rep from what I hear
Anything with monolithic cladding is to be avoided like the plague – even if it is up to the code it is screwed by its reputation so resale is poor
Penetrations through roofs and walls are still badly done (ask Seatoun school) and the Fire Service for one will simply no longer tolerate them
One of the dodgy things I still see being put up is overly complicated roofs and especially lots of different materials and/or angles
Each system on their own may be ok but it’s the joints between the systems that are where the trouble starts
Up the top of Orangi Kaupapa Rd I have seen the wind blow rain in through (closed) windows and spit into the room so draught excluders aren’t done enough or maintenance is often poor
Simple may be boring but simple doesn’t leak
A torch-on roof done properly is good IMO and a return to fully sarking a roof is a good idea too
Sealant is NOT a building material (ie it won’t work for more than a few years)
One of the cheapest fixes that a homeowner with a traditional corrugate roof can do is throw a lot of paint on it – I put about 50L of roofpaint on mine in two thick coats with an airless sprayer and it certainly helps
That’ll do pig, that’ll do
Upper Boulcott and the Terrace are just misery incarnate from an aesthetic standpoint. Weird to think that the gap between Lambton and the Terrace was once dover style white cliffs.
Vee, “White cliffs of Wellington” .. I think someone might have been gilding the lily a bit, :)
Thinking back to my geology undergrad courses, any exposed slip faces in Wellington are most likely to be greywacke, possibly fractured from previous local fault movements.. or also clay….
this early photo certainly does show an escarpment, but its pretty marginal
https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23063489
Well well well. Very interesting to see an image. That little anecdote came from some literature sent back to Blighty in the 1850s. Evidently some of the facts on the ground may have been massaged somewhat :)
I suspect that the cliffs behind, gleaming in their whiteness, would have only recently calved into the Lambton Quay after the 1855 earthquake, which caused a lot of destruction in Wellington and Wairarapa. That’s why it looks so fresh and “white”. Similar destruction along the Hutt Road as the cliffs collapsed – now, of course, all covered with greenery once more.
Getting back to the main thread of this post…. here’s a terrible tale of Gus Charteris, locked into a battle over strengthening in a central Wellington Apartment building… that makes for fairly chilling reading.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/300288889/apartment-owners-decadelong-earthquake-strengthening-battle
And despite stuff “agreeing not to name the building” they have left up this article from the 2012 hey day of Wellington apartmentista stories – which clearly points out which building it is…..
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/capital-life/7546197/The-high-life-in-Wellington
Re the Soho recladding, not that anyone would buy there
The reclad is being done to Architects specs and in places the sheets are being installed against what the manufacturer recommends
The subcontractor has raised this point with the main contractor and been ignored
Those sheets will crack again and all in the same place
Also looking at that old article about Sanctum was funny – the shear walls there are stronger than originally designed as we went insitu rather than blocks (saved time)
I put all the stairwells up on that place, apparently the body corp fees are horrendous but that is secondhand info to me
The plans were “handed” and some eedjit put the internal walls around the wrong way on one apartment
Got a bit further along the track then wondered why the lounge was out the back whoops
Interesting, thanks 60MPa ! I wondered if you had been involved in that one. So – let me get this straight – the building is covered in scaffolding as they are replacing parts of the cladding, which has cracked, is that right? Do they know why they cracked in the first place? And do we know what the cladding was / is that is cracking? And is the renovation architect the same company as the first design architect – Leushke, from Auckland?
In-situ shear walls are always going to be miles stronger than blockwork – in fact, I’m amazed that anyone these days is even specifying conc block for anything taller than a garden shed. Solid concrete is definitely the only way to go ! I’ve always thought it was a bit of a disaster of a design – but a friend of mine is living there at the moment and she says it is fine, except for the wait for the lifts of course…. severely under-lifted.
I understand it’s a 2year programme and the guys I knew who were working on it about 6mo ago talked to tenants who had no idea that it would be so long
The cracking is due to poor design but anyone who walked into the place would know
I’ve not been there but I heard about apartment bedroom doors hitting the bed so they went to king singles, service duct spacing in the ceiling being so limited (so they could fit another storey in) that the fresh air ducts got all cramped up by other services so the air circulation was poor
The same outfit that built it did the dental school apartments and they ended up getting a tent over them at some point too, hmm
The two site managers on it were having a race with each other
I feel for the poor sods who bought the Maison Cabriolet apartments too and those ones in Marian St above the carpark were so shite that Ebert Construction changed their name to Trebe when they built them so as to leave the whole effort isolated for suing later – always a bad sign is the time of establishment of the crowd who is building it
Stick with Stratum for quality or buy an older apartment that has been long established and most of its faults should have become known by that point
And if you’re buying a house I’ll give you a free tip – stick your nose into the basement and have a good sniff, that’ll tell you a whole lot
And avoid all solid plaster/monolithic cladding no matter where you find it
Otherwise have a happy week people