Information Gathering Stage

Right the next task or tasks as it happened were to find out as much as we could about the section in Ngaio.

1. Size 504m2
2. Meters from side to side and drive way
3. Drive way Right of way and easements
4. Soil condition and ground conditions
5. Engineers reports/LIM reports
6. What if any services were connected to the section
7. What size house would fit?
8. How much sunlight will the site get?
9. PRICE

So yeah we had a few things to figure out... and even as I write this after all the information we gathered there are still some things I've probably forgotten to write in the list but which we did find out about the section.

I think the first few things we found difficult to deal with were the sewer and stream that run through the section. As you can see in the picture below there is a red line that runs  through 12A!? Yeah that's a public sewer line. Scary huh... well actually not too much... thankfully.

This sewer was the cause of many many sleepless nights, emails and phone calls to councils, building companies and a few other people too. After quite a lot of discussion it was agreed that we could put a drive way and outdoor area over the sewer and stream but no house. This then meant the house location would need to be looked into and how much room would be left.

As you can also see the back half of the section had a slight incline shall we say... you remember me writing that it was a flat section well turns out we own up the bank as well! Thankfully the 102 line had already been cut away so when I went to the site and with all the awesome bushes and trees it was hard to tell just where the boundary was/finished.

The next hurdle was soil and ground conditions. To actually subdivide the section into a decent size  (over 40 years ago) the vendor's put in uncompacted fill over the drain and sewer and subsequently when the engineers report came through the solid ground in the front part of the section wasn't reached until the prob got down to about 3.6-ish meters. So pile foundations soon became a hot topic through emails, phone calls and a few nightmares!!

Having talked to quite a few people again it was concluded that most of the fill was around the drain and because we weren't building near it anyway it didn't matter. The good half of the section ranges from 0.5m-2.0-ish meters to solid ground so the foundations weren't going to be that scary after all, still pile foundations but as again a few people told us this in Wellington is quite normal!!

Finally we had everything we were ever going to need to know or as much as we could ever know and it was decision time... what do we do next? We (I mean Mike) made a spreadsheet and we (I mean me) put in 6 months worth of bank statements to see how much we had where we were spending and how much savings we currently had. This went into another spreadsheet to figure out how much we would need to borrow, mortgage rates, repayments and other stuff I vaguely know what Mike was talking about.  Having gathered all this information it was off to figure out which banks would help us and which ones wouldn't. Having talked to a few we knew that at least 2 banks and a new build finance company would help us so then it really got down to decision time... do we make an offer?! If so how much do we offer...? Not having done anything like this before we (and I mean Mike) needed time to think about it, so we slept on it (for quite some time).