This beautiful architectural home on Rocks Road needed a garage at the back of the section. However it was not ‘merely a garage’ by any means.
The first challenge onsite was to achieve a flat and stable site for the garage on an elevated cliff-front section. For months the Renovate Me team worked with diggers to excavate the earth, carting earth off, and then back onto the site. The diggers only stopped when the concrete trucks arrived to pour footings or concrete walls. Thousands of cubic meters of concrete were poured, and about 3000 concrete blocks were laid on this site. It was hard for all involved not to feel frustrated at the sheer amount of time this part of the project took, let alone the ‘hoops’ that had to be jumped to keep the geo-tech engineers and the Council satisfied.
We gained invaluable experience from this job, as building on a tricky site is not something all building companies can say they have experienced.The original garage design was of concrete block construction. We could see that constructing the garage with concrete block would take too long, and there were potential issues with the huge ‘cut’ in the cliff that with time or weather could collapse. The design of the garage was then changed to tilt panel construction. This meant the builders could water proof the walls prior to them being erected on site. The process of erecting the tilt panels took a day to finish and eliminated the risk of someone working behind the walls with a dodgy cliff behind them.
Once the walls were propped and footings poured, the team could quickly back fill the walls with drainage and avoid collapsing the bank. This all went to plan and worked well, and the garage was mostly constructed in a matter of days, rather than a few weeks if concrete blocks have been used.
The front of the garage has been lined with cedar weatherboards, and two cedar garage doors were installed. The sides of the garage have yet to be fitted with Central Otago schist stone.
