Yetchh's Redzone Relocation..

[yetchh]

Hi, so a while ago whilst deciding whether or not to shift up to golden bay, my partner and I decided to fill the gap by getting on the "ladder". We'd always wanted to relocate a house as that way we get what we want where we want it. The bank didn't see our vision and wanted 50%+ deposit, this pretty much destroyed or plans until my old man discovered an opportunity for us to realise our idea. Ex chch major Gary Moore was running a scheme where by we could buy land and shift a house while he supplied the bridging fiance, well the the NZ housing trust would. Jerry Mateparae was the patron and he is a good bloke so we went for it..

 

Found this house,

 

 

*edit..

 

Came from here,

 

 

and here's a shot from its original setting,

 

 

1968, (definitely oldschool) Fully double glazed and all rimu floors, and 20k. Had underfloor central heating in the form of what was essentially a big fuck off fan heater, has a great fan unit which I'll use somehow in the garage.

 

*edit.. the house also came with its own 6x9 garage as you can see, this was the basis for my 13x6 garage at the new site,with a veiw to using the original trusses and tin on mine.. again it's seems I don't speak the right language and it was demo'd with the rest of the section.. fucken guts..

 

And after a lot of meetings over coffee and of beer at C1, we bought this bit of land in Feb last year after deliberating for a couple of months and then almost losing it, didn't feel right initially but that's happened before and worked out better off, it's grown on me now, literally..

 

 

 

705m2 and came with a geotech report as it was tc3, 2-300mm of lateral spread. Which meant a 50k type 2a/2b foundation type which was initial go to flood zone/tc3 foundation for all the fearful engineers who didn't want to break the mould. One engineer quoted 90k, Pffft.

[yetchh]

Chopped some trees down in prep for the eventual relocation, 

 

 

Which included the yew beside the truck in the first post, the big pohutukawa and a birch to the opposite side of the pohutukawa..

 

I eventually had to stump grind the pohutukawa as much as I wanted to save it.

 

 

*edit..

 

Here's some pics of the stump grind, pics don't really show it but the stump was about 500x700 and consisted of multiple trunks encased in sand, fucked my saw at about 20% through so I bit the bullet and hired a weapon of a stump grinder..

 

 

 

 

Was a real pleasure to use compared to the seesaw type grinders..

 

Pohutukawa leaves burn real nice

 

 

Until the cops call the fire brigade.

 

 

 

 

This is where the fun started.. went round one day to check the progress of the block demo, and asbestos removal to find this,

 

 

 

All good? Yes, and then no. The douche bag asbestos removal guys thought it would be a great idea to kick the front door in and the three bedroom doors of their hinges, putting holes in the doors and smashing the architraves and jambs, cunts. Their employer was pretty apologetic about it and offered to pay for the repairs when we come to finishing, still a cunt tho. Also ripped the living/dining/kitchen ceilings down instead of just scraping them.

 

Then this happened,

 

 

 

 

 

 

And all ready to shift

 

 

It had been decided to move the house in two pieces onto the section and then crane then on to the foundations but at the last minute it was decided the crane was cost prohibitive and it would go to a storage lot at QE2, right beside ascot 18th hole as a whole house. That somehow got lost in translation from nz English to whatever fucken language house shifters use and was split in two at QE2 ( two for 2 I guess) cunts, and just to rub salt in that wound they charged 29k for the experience. CERA didn't help the cause by demanding all houses off the redzone or demo would ensue, house shifters raised their prices accordingly.. 

 

It sat in this spot for nigh on a year, shifters did a pathetic attempt at covering the split which I had to redo..

 

Storage at QE2

 

[kyteler]

Intense, man. Intense. Props to you guys, looks like quite the drama.

[Nominal]

Wow, that's a project and a half! Amazing how workers being paid to do a job can do so much damage!

 

Our house is a relocated one, but handled by the previous owner. Quite a bit of the re-joining is a bit hack, but it hasn't fallen apart yet.

[tortron]

Going to do that next time someone wants their lawns done

 

show up and kick the doors in

[Bombsquad]

All good? Yes, and then no. The douche bag asbestos removal guys thought it would be a great idea to kick the front door in and the three bedroom doors of their hinges, putting holes in the doors and smashing the architraves and jambs, cunts. Their employer was pretty apologetic about it and offered to pay for the repairs when we come to finishing, still a cunt tho. Also ripped the living/dining/kitchen ceilings down instead of just scraping them.

 

Mate as someone who works with asbestos sites every week if any of you need Azi done A: Call me first so I can talk you through it, and B: for the love of god be there to watch them!!

I own a demolition company in the Waikato and the asbestos removers in NZ are fucking shocking!! 

The last site i did in Matamata was next door to a kindy, they trashed the place, stole shit, swore and drank all day while the kids were on the school playground next door, took a week and a half to do a three day job. 

I just got told of a crowd in Auckland who were used on a site of a house being shifted and they did the same thing that happened to you, wrecked the house, turned up each day pissed as fuck and left a huge mess. 

Asbestos is the new scrap metal in turms of fuckhead cowboys thats for sure

[yetchh]

Yeah, the owner of the company said that most of the guys he gets are pretty rough, but then no-one else is interested.. all in all its been pretty good so far (this is only part of the story) with these occasional win and loss, but between the house shift and asbestos we're 40k over budget, which I found out the the night before hanmeat this year..  more to come.

[yetchh]

Passed my first council inspection today, fuck yeah. Have a chippie signing all my found work off, the inspector pulled the other very similar foundation they did up on quite a few things which they then scrambled to fix before the pour, took the bloke about 5min with his tape then he gave me the thumbs up.. beat my own chest I will..

[EpochNZ]

I'm keen to keep an eye on this, I've often wondered about the practicalities of relocating a house....

[yetchh]

Knew I should have started this thread last year, I've muddled it a bit and have to try and remember what happened when etc.. hope you guys like reading haha

 

It's been a real fuck around with the council and engineers trying to find a cheaper and better alternative to a type 2a/2b foundation, and once an engineer willing to put his skills on the line and design something better it still took him six months to come up with something that looks to me to be fairly Simple. But even before he came up with the designs, trying to decipher what the council actually wants with regards to finish floor level was a battle in its itself.

 

Type 2b, 2a has a smaller slab with one layer of steel and less excavation

 

 

My found

 

 

 

 

The ccc city flood datum was 11.8m (sea level is around the 9m Mark, why they set the datum from 9m under sea is beyond me and no-one seems to know the answer) and the kerb outside my house is at 10.75m. Apparently Brighton sunk slightly after the quakes and couple that with the apparent 1m rise in sea levels by the end of the century (even tho there's no acceleration in the rise recorded) meant the council were a bit paranoid about that number. My neighbor had hers set at 12m as did most of the other houses in the hood that had consent before the dodgy Tonkin and Taylor report, and we were happy to put ours up to where ever the insurance still applied, this ended up at 12.36 after about six months of back and forward correspondence with departments not really seeming to know what the other was doing. The fucked up thing is my partner's uncle just had a house built in Avondale (just up the river) where the stop bank is at 11.8m and his ffl is 11.6m!!? Hope it doesn't rain lots any time soon.. While this was going on another couple of issues were land height and recession planes.

 

When we initially bought the section we wanted to go with ttt rammed hollow piles, they wouldn't budge at 45k for 21 piles (2a/2b being about 47k) but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise as staying the standard 1.8m off the boundary but with a ffl of 12m put us through the southern recession plane by about 6-700mm. The neighbor wasn't interested in letting us away with this and if we had gone with the earlier foundation systems we would have had to stay nearly 3m from the southern boundary and have only 3 odd meters of living on the north side. As luck would have it the council changed the rules in January of this year and dictated the recession planes go up with the ffl, that's a fucken win, another neighbor spent 20k fighting to go through his only 4 months earlier. Back to 1.8 we go.

 

The next fuck around was land height immediately adjacent to the building platform with the council wanting the entire section being built up to 11.4m, roughly 700mm of ap40 or about 900m3 of fill, WTF!! This meant about 110m of retaining walls and associated drainage. The one contradiction in the council's code book was run off onto the adjoining properties which states that no run off shall be allowed on to neighboring properties, well being 700mm higher than everyone else there's no way in the event of major flooding you can stop runoff which they deliberated with for a few months before coming to the conclusion they didn't actually want me to fill the land 700mm and that the original height would suffice, duh. Even after all that, when I finally got the consented plans the ffl was still at a 12m.. retards...

 

House plan, need a big garage, that was part of the plan right from the beginning

 

 

Architect put in a real cheap price for the drawings, I guess that means you don't have to measure much, he managed to fuck up not only the angle of the house but it's overall length and width!? When we originally set the house out we jammed it on as much of an angle as we could, going right up to the 3m living room windows setback, at the last minute we shifted the NE corner back a meter, but with the measuring mistakes it's ended up 700m closer to where it started.. discovered that I also have 4-500mm of both the northern boundary and the southern boundary which makes the section 750m2 instead of 705.. neighbors don't care either, stoked.

[yetchh]

Sorry about the above jumbo, the was a lot going on..

 

Anyway, come Feb/Mar this year I got fed up with waiting for the bureaucracy and wanted to get my hands dirty, knowing that the location of the house was 99% final I set about scraping the section in prep for the ap40, this really was just scraping the grass off as the there was a big hole where they had demo'd the previous house, think we took it down to about 10.35 (400 below the curb) from 10.45. This was also done on the premise that the ap raft would only only be 400mm  wider than the house/foundation footprint..

 

 

 

The only real excavation was at the back 5th of the scrape where we took it from 10.70 down to the above 10.35,

 

 

 

You can see the pohutukawa stump top right of the digger, that's not me driving either, I'm shit at scraping..

[yetchh]

4 months go by with little progress other than the geotech guy deciding there was too much dirt visible and he wanted me to take off either another 200mm of dirt or get down to solid sand, turns out it took 200mm to do it and we reached very solid sand, although if I took a one dig with a shovel water seeped into the hole, fresh water too, turns out there is more than enough pressure from the massive aquifers under Canterbury to keep the salt at bay (pun intended) I was also advised to take the excavation out to a point where there would be 1200mm of the ap raft out around the footprint.

 

 

Made a pretty big pile of dirt along the fence line, should all go back. Also forgot to mention that the section comes with its own artesian well, has about a 2m head..

[yetchh]

Then one day, in early June.. bam, we have consent. I straight away ordered geocloth and 80m3 of ap40. Before I put that down I had to prof roll the excavation with a 4 ton roller, hard packed sand is very hard, like driving over a bunch of rocks, it passed the test..

 

So I proceeded,

 

 

 

 

It then had to be tested which it failed, not compact enough. If someone had told me at the beginning that I needed to do it with a 400kg plate compactor and fill right out to the cut off the excavation it would have been done in two days, suffice to say no one did and I had to order another 20m3 of ap and a compactor..

 

Obligatory kid shot..

 

 

 

Doesn't leave as nicer finish as the roller tho..

 

 

After all that it passed the compaction test and the pad height was back up to 10.50, the instruction from the geotech guy was to not completely cover the found (400mm high) but only back fill 250mm up due to the lateral spread and in the event of another quake the foundation needed to slide on the pad. So with grind height slightly higher than curb height, when the final back fill begins there should be about 100-150mm of found visible.. 

[yetchh]

3 weeks later this arrived

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off to get the second bit, 

 

 

 

Phase two..

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is about when I went home, 3:45am and I was fucken tired, had to get up at 6..

 

When I came home the next day, excitement ensued.. shit was finally getting real,

 

 

 

 

Good times..

[yetchh]

Should mention that I actually poured the found today, just to fuck the order up a bit..

[Bombsquad]

Good lord son who the fuck was instructing you on the foundation dig out?? 4 tonne double vibe roller will punch that down harder than a plate can if your doing it right, ironically though rolling correctly is the hardest easy job youll ever do.

[yetchh]

That's what I would have thought, but apparently the plate has more punch, had a good 10+ passes with the roller and only three with the plate..

[yetchh]

That weekend in a fit of spring cleaning we stripped the inside and took off all the cornice from the ceiling..

 

Was a bit of a mess..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You get the idea, we also had to strip the bathroom so as to reline it with aqualine gib, we stripped this bit of wall between the lounge and kitchen to open the place up a bit, will be removed..

 

 

my little girl doing her bit bless her.. she's loving this shit..

 

Made me feel a lot better about the mess that had been created..

[yetchh]

Then The fun started..

 

First we had adjust all the stye's under the front part of the house, I guess at 330am this stuff doesn't matter even tho your charging 10k..

 

I have a mate who owns a construction company who lent me enough form work to box up the outside of the found, the rest came from Gary's organisation. They bought a load complete with braces and pegs, but I didn't get that for nearly a week.. ordered the steel and the stumps the week earlier and set out the found.. my plan is to have a stone plinth about 1m high from the found to the bottom of the cladding (about 2.7 from the soffet) so the found is about 140 wider than the house all the way around to allow for the stone..

 

 

 

Enlisted dads army to help tie steel, my FIL actually helped out for week and a half which was fucken handy, tied most of the steel while I was at work..

 

 

Setting up the braces, came with a bag of tek screws which made everything easy, the pegs were just lengths of r16 and I didn't relish the thought of driving 150 odd by sledgie into hard packed ap so I made a driver which consisted of a cut down sds-max kango bit with some 20mm rhs square welded to it as a sleeve. Worked well for about 15 pegs then the weld broke, managed to do the outside lot before the rhs completely split up the corners.. must be pretty severe. Had another go with different welds with the same result, no wonder they're 3-400 to buy.. mine cost nothing, did the job but..

 

 

 

More in-laws to help out..

 

 

Almost done, 

 

 

Stumps arrived last Monday (12th Sept), so my bro in-law and I smashed them in,

 

 

 

High tensile steel porn, was actually cheaper than mild..

 

 

Spent another day cleating and bracing the internal boxes before I had and passed the engineers inspection, then had the ccc inspection on Monday, passed that. The chippie who's signing the found off came out and got me all paranoid I hadn't out enough bracing on (even tho I knew I had) so I spent a day being all nervous and shit.. pump arrived 40min late..

 

 

Concrete not long after

 

 

Went off without a hitch.. fucken stoked

 

 

 

 

 

And then as I had to put fall around the stumps to stop pooling we decided, even tho no one's ever gonna see it, to pull the cleats off and finish it a bit.. looks nice,

 

 

 

 

And that brings it up to date, have to order the wood for the secondary bearers and joists, but have debox that shit first.. this weekends job..

 

Thanks for reading.. hugs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Nominal]

So, what's the idea of it's behaviour in a quake - does the house/foundation slide around on the compacted base layer?