How the rot set in new homes

By WARREN GAMBLE and JAN CORBETT

John Barrett pulled up in his ute, clomped over an exclusive Remuera cul-de-sac in his heavy work boots, and discovered a $600,000 catastrophe.

This Epsom builder with 29 years' experience under his tool belt had been called out by the recently arrived American owner of her New Zealand dream home.

The original builder had vanished, leaving the two-storey, architecturally designed house unfinished.

"It was a bomb site," says Barrett, now into his sixth month of sorting out the mess.

"If you dropped a bomb and scattered bits of building over it, and some was left standing and some totally demolished, that was this house."

Barrett's firm had originally lost out at tender with a quote about $100,000 higher than the successful company.

He could see where those costs had been cut as soon as he walked up the drive. The front wall which should have been filled with concrete was hollow.

Further inspection revealed a depressing catalogue of defects. The home's concrete base was cracked because clay excavated from the swimming pool was used as a base instead of hard aggregate. In the two-storey lounge, $750 sheets of poplar burr for the curved ceiling had been replaced by cheaper pine, and on the roof a whole series of small faults combined to let water in.

Some of it spilled on to the ceiling, staining the pine, another torrent collapsed part of the garage ceiling, and a combination of a leak and paint applied without a sealer saw a waterfall down one wall.

On her first day in the house, the owner watched water spill from a light fitting in the kitchen because an enclosed deck above had not been given enough drainage.

Barrett estimates the cost of repairs so far to be around $150,000. There seems little chance of recovery because the firm's owner has disappeared and his company is reportedly broke.

Barrett says the problems illustrate the building industry's vicious circle - the demand for the cheapest price from owners, architects and developers being met by less skilled tradespeople using cheaper products.

It is the same equation at work in last week's revelations that many lower-cost new homes may be rotting because of water seeping through new "chilly-bin" claddings into chemical-free, kiln-dried timber.

And while some question the quality of the products, the wider question is: are our builders up to it? Part of the answer lies in our proud tradition as a nation of do-it-yourselfers since the early settlers clambered ashore at the top of the Kerikeri inlet and put up the first stone and wooden structures that survive to this day.

A New Zealander's right to build his or her own home has meant the industry has never been regulated, unlike plumbers or electricians.

Anyone can call themselves a builder, whether they are qualified and experienced, or cannot tell one end of a hammer from the other.

Barrett tells of one alleged builder turning up to an Otahuhu site with a sack. In it was a hammer, a crowbar and a $17 handsaw. He lasted only a few days.

A North Shore builder with more than 30 years' experience says at one job a carpenter he hired was putting up ceiling battens using a nail gun. When power was cut he asked the builder what he should do.

"I said, just nail them in by hand. He says, I can't, I've never done it, I don't know how."

His partner says some so-called builders rely far too much on silicone and other fillers to plug problems. Such products deteriorated within a few years, letting in water.

"In the old days everyone took pride in what they did, now no one gives a damn. It's just get it finished and get the dollars."

The anecdotal skill drop has coincided with a change in building styles and products.

Even through the years we called Britain home, the abundance of local timber meant we drew our building styles more from North America than we did from the British, who favoured brick.

As any one who has lived in a draughty villa through the winter will know, one of the reasons they have survived for so long is that the wind is free to whistle through them, drying out the timber as it goes.

But with the escalating energy costs that accompanied the energy crisis in the 1970s, combined with environmental concerns about burning fossil fuels, came the pressure for homes that would keep the heat in, not let it out.

First came Pink Batts, followed by a raft of modern building technologies that were smarter, warmer and cheaper than timber.

At that level, says Greg O'Sullivan, founding director of Auckland building inspection firm Prendos, what the scientists were producing raced ahead of the builders' understanding - a problem that has been worldwide.

At the same time, this country changed the way it trained builders in a way many argue has led to a drop in standards, although that view is contested by those running the Industry Training Organisation.

"When I was a boy," says O' Sullivan, "I did night-school once a week and two block courses a year for four to five years. Now there is not much off-site training. There's a book [trainees] fill out. I'm a sceptic about it."

Indeed in 1992, the Government of the day did away with the apprenticeship training board and launched industry training organisations. It also introduced unit standards, recognising skills obtained in informal ways.

Among the plethora of organisations involved in the building industry is the BCITO, or Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation, which runs the modern apprenticeship scheme for builders.

Its chief executive, Leigh Thomson, explains there are two routes into a building career. One is to get a job with a builder and begin on-site training. The other is to first spend six months at a polytechnic doing a pre-trade block course, at your own expense. People who have completed the latter are generally favoured by employers, he says.

The apprentice is indeed required to keep a record of the work they have done which is checked by their assessor, who is usually their employer.

The ITO employs 22 training advisers who visit apprentices, check their records and assess their competency in certain tasks. But with 2240 apprentices currently in training, that is one inspector to 100 apprentices. Thomson considers that an adequate ratio. Not only are apprentices visited four or five times a year, but the advisers are locally based and get to know who is good and who is bad in their local building industry.

Initially the ITO system included block courses at a polytech. But in the late 1990s it dropped that requirement, making block courses optional in favour of distance-learning for those who preferred it.

There were two reasons for the change, says Thomson. One was that employers didn't want their staff off the job, the other that the average age of apprentices increased from 16 to 22. Older apprentices were more likely to have family commitments that made it difficult for them to be away from home for weeks at a time.

Not surprisingly, Thomson considers the new system, which assesses competency rather than the number of hours worked, to be superior.

He says the record shows apprentices are still clocking up from 7000 to 8000 hours on the job - close to the same time-served requirement of the old system. While he has heard comments from builders that standards have dropped, he has seen no evidence of it, he says.

But talk to Garry Shuttleworth at the Certified Builders Association and he will tell you "the skills base has been hammered. After 10 years of this training method we believe standards have fallen to an all-time low."

Of chief concern is that all the training, both practical and theoretical, is done by the employer.

"If the builder on site is doing it wrong, they'll be trained wrong," says Greg O'Sullivan.

John Wise, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Technology at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, agrees. "Apprentices are competitive and like to know how they compare with their peers," he says. "In a polytechnic they are together and can compete on speed and quality. On site, they don't get that benchmarking opportunity. If you bring them together in a polytechnic they get good coverage of the theory. Students on site may know how to do something, but not why they do it."

At the work site, John Barrett says his 8000-hour (roughly four-year) apprenticeship was far better than today's training, which could push out qualified carpenters in half the time with "half-arsed results."

To get more knowledge and experience for his apprenticed youngest son, he paid $2700 for him to attend a polytechnic course on project management and commercial construction. Add to that the $900 apprentice registration fee, and it was easy to see why some employers could not afford the cost and time involved.

A project manager for a middle-sized North Shore firm says apprentices are an endangered species. Neither Master Builders nor the industry training organisation could tell him how to go about hiring one.

So concerned is the Certified Builders Association that it is launching its own apprenticeship scheme called ITaB, Industry Training Association - Building.

Not only does it return to the traditional 8000-hour apprenticeship, but makes it compulsory to complete theoretical training at a polytechnic.

Ask Leigh Thomson why, if the ITO system is so good, the Certified Builders have felt it necessary to take this step, and he will say it is largely political. The Certified Builders Association, which set up in opposition to the Master Builders Federation, is merely trying to raise its profile, he thinks.

Established three years ago as an alternative to the federation, the difference between the two is that Certified Builders must have a trade qualification, while Master Builders do not.

But its chief executive, Chris Preston, says it is building companies, not builders, who register as Master Builders. They have to have been in the industry for six years, be credit-worthy and produce references from happy clients.

Preston says that of the 23,000 Master Builder guarantees that are still live, 30 to 50 result in claims each year for either poor design, poor workmanship or poor building materials. He disagrees that building standards have slipped, but acknowleges they may not have kept pace with advancing technologies.

While Greg O'Sullivan says there are good builders and bad builders irrespective of which indemnifying organisation they belong to, there is no doubt there are unqualified builders.

One of the hallmarks of our do-it-yourself culture is that this is one of the few countries in the world where builders do not require any form of registration or licensing.

In New South Wales, for instance, builders have to be licensed in a system intrinsic with insurance requirements. To have a licence they have to have warranty insurance. If they have had a number of claims against them, they are unlikely to have insurance and won't get licensed.

The New South Wales Government is now circulating a discussion paper on the idea of making it a licensing requirement that builders enrol in continuing education - similar to the requirement we have for doctors.

Here, Leigh Thomson says we need to get better at getting builders along to courses on new building methods and technologies. But, he says, "if you've ever tried to get a builder along to training, [you'll find] they won't come during the day, some won't come at night."

But while training and qualifications may not be compulsory, we do have both minimum standards in a building code and building inspectors, employed or contracted by local councils, whose job is to ensure everything has been done right.

Maurice Hinton, national president of the Building Officials Institute, worked in the building control area of Manukau City Council for 25 years. His company, Compass Building Certifiers, provides the construction industry with an alternative to council services.

He is all too aware that skills among builders have slipped, driven in part by the pressure to keep building costs down. It is cheaper to hire contractors to erect various parts of the building - meaning no one has the overall responsibility as head contractor.

Hinton says the inspection process often rested on the trust between an inspector and the head contractor. These days, he says, no one wants the responsibility of being head contractor - the person who can be sued if things go wrong. Perhaps more importantly, cost restraints limit the number of site visits inspectors make because they are paid for by the home owner.

People get what they pay for, he says.

Still filling the gaps on what should have been a Remuera dream home, John Barrett cannot help but agree. "Everybody loves a bargain, everybody loves to save money, but the public doesn't think to check out a builder's credentials thoroughly enough.

"If you're building the biggest asset you own, it comes down to if you want the best home, you get the best builder, and pay what's fair."