The Land & Purchase
After our time on The Block, we had sold our house in Muriwai and wanted to head towards the North Shore where Alex grew up and family still live. We looked around Beach Haven and Birkenhead at a few houses and sections, and we quickly decided that we wanted to build from scratch to be able to have the freedom to design a space that would work for our future family.
We came across this section and purchased in March 2015 for $435,000 just before prices skyrocketed in the area.
It was a private sale, the housing market was escalating and getting out of our reach, and even though we didn’t really have a plan we just knew that this was the area that we wanted to raise our family in. So we bought with Corban loving the idea of the challenge to make this work.
It is a 600 sqm site with some pretty difficult terrain to navigate around, hence why this land has been vacant for over 20 years.
Why so difficult? Let me take a deep breath while I rattle off these limitations for you.
This is an extremely steep site with some gradients as steep 40 degrees.
We have a public sewer pipe running diagonally through the property
Height restrictions imposed by the neighbours, which makes it difficult to build up.
A power pole situated right in the middle of the entrance of the property
The main fibre line that connects NZ to the rest of the world runs right past our gate. If we were to damage the cable it would cost $1,000,000 a minute in losses to the economy according to the NEC patrol man. We only found this out after we had completed all of the excavation of the property. No one even knew it was there, not even Vector or the ‘before you dig websites’.
Major consultation required by Council for Visual and environmental impact reports. Ecological Assessment reports as well as requiring consultation and consent from 13 different Iwi to get consent to build as it backs onto a Significant Ecological area.
This site was never going to be a walk in the park, but we were up for the challenge if it meant that we could get our dream home in our dream neighbourhood.