COME TOGETHER

COME TOGETHER

"Here come old flat top
He come grooving up slowly ....."

Could be lyrics relating to moving houses on big trucks. 

We've been watching some episodes of Moving Houses on TV One recently.

This is where people purchase an older house like a villa or a bungalow and have it cut up and transported to a new location. Our house was cut into three pieces and transported by barge from Whangarei to its current location in The Heads. It's a largish villa  so had to be cut into three for manoeuvrability.

The programme is fascinating in several ways. The equipment used is incredible with the hydraulics on the massive trucks being able to adjust to the minutest movements making the parts of the house come together effortlessly. The logistics of moving 200 plus square metre buildings hundreds of kilometres along narrow and windy roads makes for interesting viewing. What particularly interests me though is the viability of 'kit-set' building. These houses (and churches and sheds) are cut up and reassembled on-site with very little damage and often with invisible mending. In our villa we cannot easily see where it was cut up and joined. I wish that we had photographs of the day to show this but it was in the late 1970s I think.

I'm interested in kit-set and modular housing and have written on this in the past.

MODULE LIFE

I still maintain that New Zealand could become a world leader in the technology behind modular housing and should  embrace it in  new building plans for reason of efficiency, quality, safety, speed and cost. If I wasn't happy with our jigsaw house I'd consider buying this kind of build with the opportunity of adding to or downsizing it later.