
Originally Posted by
SPman
- a pole house, with Hardietex cladding,
I got so disillusioned in the 90's with new housing, I went into maintaining and rebuilding old and heritage buildings - yes - they leak as well......

"a pole house, with Harditex cladding" 
Who approved that?

Originally Posted by
Winston001
builders know what to do - why would there be problems? It isn't as if building a house is a new idea - we've been doing it for 6000 years.
All buildings leak and always have (somewhere). The better ones are/were either designed (usually very conservatively / bland) to minimise and manage water ingress and/or/are/were built of more durable materials and in a way (drafty) that greatly mitigated potential for damage. Even then there has always been plenty of instances where damage repairs have been more than they needed to be (often involving visually obvious but historically ignored leaks)

Originally Posted by
Winston001
The "cheapest" building methods in New Zealand are still bloody expensive. When I had a simple house built in 1997 I could have bought two in Australia for the same money. Yes I know they don't have earthquakes but even so, the cost of building even a basic box here is damned high.
I have never been able to understand that. And why people in Oz & Fiji can/have been able to buy NZ materials (timber and gib in particular) cheaper (after all the additional shipping costs) than we could buy the same product locally. I doubt that would have anything to do with the old business round table days and/or any sort of protectionism though
... so I just can't figure it out.
Political correctness: a doctrine which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd from the clean end.
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