I am about to start winding up my leaky house repair project again. I have been out of action with this remedy for several years now due to:
- The funds I received to repair my leaky house were grossly under estimated by Prendos, hence after paying off the lawyer there was only around a 15-20% of the estimated true cost to fix the house
- The new standards around weather tightness were not robust enough for me to be sure that they would be permanent and my house would comply for at least 25 years
- There was so much competition in the builder market that it was near impossible to get a builder, and if you did, you would pay high prices
- There is a current investigation into why builders are charging so much to fix leaky homes. This might expose those who have been taking too much advantage of the situation.
- The collapse of around 20 finance companies in NZ, including one which had $55,000 of the funds I had saved towards fixing my leaking house
- After taking off some time to heal mentally from the 8.5 years of hell going through court cases, I injured my arm, preventing me from going back to work for nearly 2 years – hence my savings are somewhat depleted
BUT!!! I am a determined person who will succeed in spite of this – and so it is time to start revamping my plans to rebuild this house and get this monster monkey off my back.
In the interim I have not been idle. I have been investigating options:
- Do I repair or completely rebuild? – there are cost and design issues to consider
- How can I integrate Green building techniques into my house without significantly increasing the cost ? – this may be a case of building in the option to change or add elements later
- Waiting for building costs to get off the high – the building industry is certainly slowing now so I will hopefully have better options
Learn from past rebuilds - many of the initial leaky house repairs are failing again. In fact – I have a deck and entrance area that was built AFTER the leaky house syndrome was publicised and it now has failed – so back to Court for a second time
New Methods - there are some great new technologies and building materials that have come onto the market in the past few years which are ideal for rebuilding. We will cover these in more detail later.
Coming Next: Investigating New Materials