Posts by David Haywood
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to Lilith __,
Isn’t Barhill the site of that Victorian-era “ideal village”? Perhaps you could start a new one?
Yes, we've started this (actually on the suggestion of a PA reader)...
But run into insurmountable problems. Almost all the available land has covenants on it that prevent relocating houses -- apparently no-one wants old houses near them (and makes this a condition of allowing neighbours to subdivide their rural properties).
The only land without covenants seems to have power pylons on it (to which I have no objection but everyone else does).
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to BenWilson,
Well, there is always renting, I guess. Could be a good option until the earth stops shaking your assets to pieces.
Without kids that would be my preferred option.
But living in a freezing uninsulated rental (as they nearly all are), and/or moving the kids in and out of schools on the whim of landlords who suddenly decide to sell the house (as tends to happen in the few warm/insulated rentals) is a real problem. Bob and Polly only have one childhood and I want to make it a good one.
But I guess you can only do what you can do.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to Robert Urquhart,
+$ (and predicting the next post from David will be in protest)
God, I'm so predictable.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to 3410,
How about setting up a donation thing for Haywood’s power bill? I’m in for $20.
That's a super-kind suggestion -- but no need! We have funds for that. Luckily the rest of the year has been very warm and our heating bill has been quite moderate.
But thank you so much all the same. As always on PA, I am very touched by people's kindness.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to Russell Brown,
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
Well, I think perhaps that post was written at a low moment, when I had lost my usual optimism.
Bob just vomited (neatly caught by Jen in her empty glass of morning orange juice ) and now says he feels better. The baby did an enormous poo -- and started smiling again immediately afterwards. The snow covers up all the cracks and sinkholes in the road and makes it look very pretty.
And Jen points out that we could stay in CHCH, as long as we don't mind trying to find a house in the green-zoned part of East Christchurch. The thing is -- with my recent seismological research -- I don't want to move anywhere with an altitude less than 16 metres above mean sea level. That rather limits our choices.
But there are plenty of nice parts of Canterbury at this altitude not in CHCH. It's just that commuting these distances (in a car) is against everything I believe in from an energy engineering point of view.
Here's a section I've been seriously looking at in Barrhill, which we could afford to move our existing house onto. Commute no worse (in terms of time) than many have in Auckland. It could be very nice.
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Currently pouring 20 kW into our house and can’t get the temperature above 15 deg C. Spent more than $30 yesterday alone on heating. Heating bill could be close to $1000 for this month (not including water heating).
In its pre-earthquake state, the house was insulated above code, so I guess the polystyrene that I duct-taped over the place where the house has broken in two isn’t helping much.
The four-year-old is sick, and the seven-month-old fractious (possibly getting sick). The road is 30 cm deep in snow and quite undrivable.
I’m extremely worried that the electricity might cut out – or that we might have another big quake.
In other circumstances I would be loving this snow; not so these days of living in post-apocalypse Avonside.
In other news, I’m spending about six hours per day working on an insurance settlement. It appears that the news is much worse than I originally thought. We lose something like $140,000 on our purchase price (of a couple of years ago); and have to find around another $150,000 on top of that to move elsewhere in Christchurch. I can’t see the banks lending us another $290,000 on top of our existing mortgage (and I wouldn’t want to borrow this much in any case).
So, unless CERA can do a deal on our special circumstances, it looks like we won’t be able to stay in Christchurch.
Apparently, I can still find it in myself to complain after all.
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Hard News: The Orcon Great Blend 2011 in…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
’ve discovered this wonderful thing called E-mail. It’s just like posting on a forum/social network, but (in theory) the message only goes to the people you address it to. Just brilliant, really. Have they had this long?
Okay, fair enough. Have deleted those comments and will continue as per your advice.
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Southerly: Things to be Grateful For: A…, in reply to Allison Haywood,
HI David! All the best dads are “sled dogs!”… somewhere I have piks of us having a picnic by Lake Rotoiti with snow down to the shoreline from a couple of years ago. Quite magical. Unless it hangs around too long…
Ha! Now we’ve had three Dr Haywoods on this thread – only a couple more to get the full set!
The snow has hung around a bit too long here. We didn’t have the plow down our road until Wednesday – so couldn’t get the car out until then. Even now we still have about 20 cm of snow on the south side of our house, but most of it’s gone from the north side.
Other parts of the city seem miraculously clear. Apparently snow, like earthquakes, prefers Avonside to elsewhere in Christchurch.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to krustacean,
I have asked for a reassessment of my ‘repairable’ house in the redzone…and I made sure to advise them to quote for foundations that are suitable for liquafacted land (not regular undamaged land). AMI responded they would quote for foundations per council regulations
For AMI to meet the council regulations then they would have to comply with the Building Act. This means that the foundations must comply with the Building Code to at least the same extent as they did before.
But this does not just mean replacement of the existing foundations with the same system. The severely damaged land has moved the goal-posts (as it were,) so that even a system 100 per cent in compliance with the Building Code on the day before the earthquake would now require very significant modification to be 100 per cent compliant in the post-earthquake context.
I’ve checked with the CCC and they have confirmed that this analysis of the situation is correct. Of course, in many cases, it is a hell of an engineering job to assess what percentage of compliance a given building's foundations were before the earthquake – and then to somehow duplicate that same percentage of compliance in a rebuilt foundation system. In fact it is so expensive to figure out that it will just be cheaper to bring all replaced foundations into 100 per cent compliance with the Building Code.
That’s the good news; here’s the bad news…
I’ve just found out that my insurance company (Tower) does not believe that they have to comply with either the Building Act or the Building Code for the hypothetical repairs. They believe that the EQC legislation gives them an out so that they only have to do the hypothetical repairs on hypothetically undamaged land.
I don’t know at this stage whether they’re correct or not – but I guess they’ve had their legal weasels go through this pretty thoroughly.
It’s so drummed into you as an engineer that you have to comply with standards, etc. that it never occurred to me that insurance companies would have got their mum to write them a sick note on this. But quite possibly they have.
Do you have AMI’s response in writing? On the face of it, it seems that this *would* oblige them to comply with the Building Act/Code and may be crucial to any legal action that you take over this.
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Southerly: Things to be Grateful For: A…, in reply to Rik,
your gorgeous looking property is in the red zone and as such you will have to vacate at some point in the future? Or are you allowed to make repairs and stay on – no doubt without any insurer wanting to touch you?
That's about the size of it. Also, if we stay, CERA can kick us off the land whenever they want.
I'm trying to lobby CERA to give us the option of moving the house somewhere else -- but, if we do, we won't be able to afford to stay in CHCH (we'll have to go into mid-Canterbury or Bank's Peninsula somewhere).
If CERA aren't interested in letting homeowners move their houses then dozens of 100-year-old houses like this (which are comparatively undamaged by the earthquake) will be bulldozed. It'll be a huge chunk of NZ's architectural heritage needlessly destroyed.