Hi all,
I've been browsing the site for a while now and there is certainly a wealthof information here so I thought I sound you guys out on a few things.
My partner and I own a three bedroom home on the North Shore of Auckland.We're in a pretty good area, close to the sea, good schools and so on, andthat's all great, but sadly every time it rains outside, it rains inside aswell! We purchased the property about 11 years ago and as first time buyers wewere shamefully ignorant of the necessary caution and numerous pitfalls thataccompany such an important financial decision.
Unlike many caught up in the "leaky home crisis" our home wasbuilt in 1986, a few years before the period that seems to be most notoriousfor dodgy weathertightness issues. Theexterior is (I’m told) an early Hardi Board monolithic plaster boardproduct. It is fixed directly to theinterior timber framing with no cavity system and there are various othertrademark leaky home features, like ... poor flashings, inadequate ground toclading clearance (in places, concrete has been layed directly againstcladding), a very poorly designed and constructed deck with a Butenol finishbase ... the list goes on.
The upshot of all this is that the house leaks! The deck has leaked for many years, butrecently we started seeing a huge volume of water leaking into our laundry andan adjacent bathroom. Outside these tworooms concrete has been layed directly against the cladding and to make mattersworse the ground level is higher than the floor level. When we realised we had a severe leak, wedecided to pull out some gib board to see what was going on behind the wall. Low and behold ... The timber framing isrotted so badly that in places, it is basically gone ... Decayed and compostedinto something very closely resembling top soil. There is a large amount of black mould andit’s obvious the damage is quite extensive.
So ... Over the past week or so, we met with 4 different people from variouscompanies/builders who deal with such things to talk about a repair. Each one said the same thing, that the housewould need a “full reclad” and that targeted repairs would not be possible asthe damage was too extensive.
We have since determined that the cost of a reclad, given our financialposition is most likely going to be impossible, so we are now trying to figureout how to salvage something from thesituation. The most obvious of course isto just fix the damage ourselves and attempt to sell the property. We don’t consider this an option though, as itwould be pretty morally reprehensible to pass this problem on to someone else... To say nothing of legal issues! Theonly option remaining seems to be to sell the house ‘as is’ and get what moneywe can for it. A couple of the companiesthat suggested recladding told us that if we were to do so, land value or closeto it is about all we should expect to get.
My question ... Does anybody have any better ideas or are we screwed? We made a mistake when we purchased our houseand we don’t want to make another one when we sell it.
Thanks
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