Home Again
Home Again…
The first few days we were settling in, stayed with Mum and Dad for a couple off weeks then moved to a flat Dad owned, which became vacant for several weeks. One day, I took Joan and David into Auckland on the train. When we got into the carriage, it was one with the old slatted seats. David said it looked like a “Petticoat Junction” train. (A TV serial of that time). Soon after, the train paused at “Silvia Park” station which then was an old boarded building and David said it was “Petticoat Junction”. They were not very impressed. In Queen Street, we were all conscious of how few people there were about.
For work I went back to R H Marsh Ltd. The firm I had left when I went to England, but it wasn’t the same somehow and after 3 months, I left.
I had a desire to be self-employed. Joan was rather dubious but I had a couple of repair jobs to do, and my first newspaper advert brought in three requests for quotes so Joan was much happier.
Also we had found a house to buy. Of about 1920s vintage. It looked poor as it hadn’t had any paint for about 20 years but was basically sound. Also the section was large (77 perches) and probably subdivisible. So for the next seven years I spent a lot of spare time working there. First I removed all the old paint from the weather boards and repainted those. In the dining room, there was a fireplace between two small casement windows. This old chimney smoked badly and was in the way, so we took it out. Patched up the floor and the wall to window height and fixed a landscape sash between the casements. This gave us a nice bright room and much more use. Lots more renovations followed over the years. The rear half of the section was a jungle of woods and old trees. When we started in clearing that, I found the previous owner had been a collector of other people’s old rubbish and a large quantity was in the long grass down there. Enough corrugated iron to have come off a complete house. Including spoutings etc. Also there was a lot of old concrete that had been foundations and floors for some hen houses. Eventually got it all cleared away and the ground mowable. Also started a vege garden. Joan tried flower gardening but having lived all her life in a middle floor flat hadn’t any knowledge. Also got disheartened by the crops of Oxalis that come along.
Meanwhile work kept coming along and I was doing quite well (1965 to 1970). Got up to some quite biggish jobs for a new starter, and twice hired another carpenter. The first one was not very good so he didn’t last long. But the next bloke, Tom Arvidson, was quite a good tradesman. Also he was very willing and as he lived in our street where I could collect him, everything in that line was good. Until 1967. The government of NZ used to try to control affairs by restricting the amount of finance available. This meant a lot of work and particularly building work would go in surges. Around election year, they relaxed restrictions and work boomed. This made them look great to the electors. During the middle year between elections they clamped down so there would be money for the next up swing at the nest election time. This meant builders were struggling to get enough work to keep on good tradesmen. And many went bankrupt by cutting prices too close. I was having trouble getting enough work for two. I owned a section in Eden Street Papatoetoe so decided to put up a spec house. We started at the end of 1967. Then Tom was offered a good job doing maintenance work for the police dept. So I told him to take it.
December and January Joan and I did a tour of the South Island. David didn’t want to come with us, so he took a job on a farm.
During February and March, I continued with the spec house until it was closed in. Then other people’s jobs started coming in again, so went back to them, but determined to not employ labour again. Most contracts were additions on existing buildings. A lot were difficult jobs that other builders didn’t want and I often wished I had never seen them.
In November 1969, I had a job, mostly making edgings and paths for a bowling green. I did one week there when I had a lot of excavation work done and bought in most of the timber for the edgings. Then the head people of the bowling club came around and said the job would have to stop. Somebody had forgotten to post a letter and their loan wasn’t coming through. They agreed to pay for work done and materials supplied, but didn’t say it would be five months before I received it.
The next contract was to be a house, due to start in January but he hadn’t managed to get finance either. So I went back to my spec house. Kept me busy but was using up my capitol. In January after family discussion, we decided I should carry on with the house until money ran out. I then got a job on wages and gradually finish the house as money became available, then when it was finished Joan and I would move into the new house and let the old one we then occupied. And so it came to pass. In November 1970 we moved and lived there for the next 25 years.
Meanwhile I had a job with McKerras Bros Ltd” building Mangere College. I worked there for 15 months, then did two short jobs with them by which time I was made redundant. A good job while it lasted.
I then went to work for a firm called “Moduloc Ltd” a very new firm who had patented a prefabricated panel system for house wall construction. All interior work was a tongue and groove edged vertical boarding. The exterior work was half tanalised plywood, most of which they put through a grooving machine. This cut grooves on the sheet faces to give them a vertical boarding effect. Each wall panel was to a set width, and each consisted of two face layers with spacers between. Exterior panel had spacers to all four edges and one horizontal at the centre. Interior panels had three horizontal spacers. Complications occurred because plywood sheets were only 8 ft long and all our sheets had to be longer, so quite a lot of time and effort involved scarfing sheets to increase their length. Also we had to set out and cut the top ends carefully to accommodate gable ends and opening. They had sold a couple of sets, which the owners liked. But being a new untried idea councils were very reluctant to except them. They all wanted them tried out for a year, in somebody else’s country. Nobody wanted to be first. They eventually got started after a bad cyclone destroyed and lot of Darwin in Australia, and they wanted new dwellings very quickly to re-house their population. But long after I had left Moduloc.
Another problem. All the panels were to be pre-painted and to do this economically they brought in spray painting equipment. Reasonable, but they didn’t have any dust extraction system so with paint and varnish droplets everywhere plus dust from the grooving machine it was far from healthy for the workers. They were trying to get a building firm to back them financially, but with very little success. I could see them bankrupt very easily, as I had another proposition offered me, I left.
Near us there was a family whom I had done work for previously. The daughter and her husband wanted the grandmother to come and live with them. She was reluctant but finally agreed. If Mr Hall (me) would do the job. This worked in, with me wanting out with Moduloc. So away I went, again self-employed. Turned out a good job plus being on a main road it fetched in other enquiries. Two of these went ahead.
Also about that time I tendered a labour only price to build two flats as a private venture for an architect. These went ahead and also led to a lot more work with that outfit over the next five years. The owner of the units was head architect of quite a big design firm, but there and most of my other work with them was for Graham Fox personally, or for syndicates, he created with his colleagues. The cap I dealt with mostly; Bernard Coates; had started his working life as a carpenter and joiner in England. After the war he emigrated to NZ and soon had a building firm up and running.
Some years later he became Clerk of Works with the Ministry of Works. Then in his 50s he started in with Fox and his partners. They did a lot of design work on hospitals. His job was to go through the design drawings as they were produced and criticise mostly on the practicability side, which he did with great vigour. Then during construction he would go on site to help work out other problems as the occurred. Finally, he would check out work done re progress payments. So supervising building houses was easy, he and I got on well together.
The year after I did the flats I built a house for them, The next two years I built factories. The first one at Avondale was the larger, 200ft long by 80ft wide. I as employed on wages, to do the carpentry work, supervise the other trades and do anything else that nobody else wanted to do. Due to another small contract, I didn’t start there until the foundations and floor had been laid. Next stage, two riggers and a crane driver were erecting steel portals (steel posts and roof beams across the building which followed the cross sectional shape). These were tied together with steel channels, which became purlins. Outside all this there were concrete block walls. Parapet height they were butted up to the building next door. At the road end, they were a gable end, the other long side was to face a driveway area and had three sets of roller doors in it. Block work between, went to five feet above floor level, then became glass in patent aluminium mullions all screwed together to timber plates fixed to the blocks and the steel framing above.
There were several problems for me in the roof areas. For about one third of the width of the building from the parapet wall side the roof on that side was quite steep then there was a vertical section about 6ft high that was to be glazed. The rest was metal roofing on the vertical glazed sections there was timber at the top and bottom so glazing bars could be screwed in easily. The bottom timber was 4×2 fixed to a steel beam, But at the top the timber, they wanted a 12″x2″ set on edge. The top of this was 20feet above the floor, the portals were at 20ft centres, and were for further apart than the length of timbers would span. Also the actual weight of wet 12×2 was more than I could lift up there, let alone swing around and fasten in a horizontal position. Particularly if fixing was at one end only and the rest left swinging in the breeze until I could connect on the next piece. So I had to convince them that two smaller sections, one of top of the other would do. Finally agreed, and I made sure that end joints of one layer didn’t coincide with the ones below. This gave a strengthening effect at the joints. Still heavy work getting them into place.
Another problem was what to stand on, as the roofing hadn’t been laid. I requested three metal brackets be made that would hook onto the purlins. So I could lay out planks for a deck. They worked out well except the steel work was too large a section, and they were very heavy. Once these were in place, I could lay planks over them. But to get enough height for the top beam I had to set up saw stools on the bottom planks then plank again over the stools. All very precarious, and added to by the fact that I had to dismantle each section and move it all along for the next bay. Quite a heavy week, shifting planks and the fixing of the permanent beams was only a quarter of the time up there.
Another problem area was the hanging frieze wall on the drive inside. Here the top plate was to be bolted to a steel channel at the end of the roof. All the rest was suspended from this top plate and the bottom edge packed out from the portal posts but only for stability. The face cladding was 3/16 flat fibrolite, fixed horizontally. The bottom edge had to project one inch below the timber work too for a drip, which created supporting problems until fixing of the sheets and the jointers. Too add to the confusion the steel fabrications had not drilled the steel channel for bolt holes. So Gilbert had difficult work to do from trestle and planks, the channel being 11ft or more above the ground. The bolt holes at about 4ft centres were half inch through 3/8′ steel. Lots of time moving the scaffolding and climbing up and down.
Other contractors did the actual roof cladding and came intermittently. We also had delays through the drainlayers. It was one of those government organised boom periods when materials were hard to get.
The storm water drains were all 6″ ceramic, which are not common. Berne found a contractor, who said he had enough pipes for the job, so employed him. But he hadn’t told us he didn’t have enough of the rubber jointing rings. Never mind, in a typical rush-in way he brought in his digger and excavated for the drains, started laying pipes until he ran out of rings then spent a week driving around all the outlets between Taupo and Kaitaia buying up rings where he could. Meantime we used a lot of effort clambering over open drains and heaps of earth, carrying in materials etc. which should have been offloaded from the trucks straight onto the concrete floor just where they were wanted. His labourers were his daughters – three Maori girls in their 20s.
Inside the building there was a lot of partitioning but not to the original layout. Originally, the building was to have been divided into three factories with two fire walls between. These required 6×2 wall studding which had been delivered to the site too early. The tenant wanted the whole factory without firewalls. So the 6×2 was to be used for ordinary partitions which could have been done in 4×2. Some of these partitions were 12ft high and most had to follow the roof pitch. This meant a lot of very heavy lifting to stand up these partitions. But the job was finally finished. I was there 9 months on that site.
The second factory was much smaller and part of it had a mezzanine floor where they wanted an office. This job went along fairly smoothly and after a lot of leading, I was allowed to make the stairs. I hate to spend months on a job doing all the rough work, then see somebody else get the best job, which is actually my trade.
Third winter, the architectural firm divided up and the part Fox was taking over was moving to brand new office space. They employed me to make a lot of blondwood shelving which when finally erected also formed rooms for storage. Such as stationery supplies, old drawing store, dead letter store and library shelves for their technical books. There were also a lot of cupboards and shelving in partner’s offices, which were mostly done in Sapelle veneered custom wood. They first hired a lower ground floor area in another building where I set up my gear and prepared most of this material, which was then taken into the new office and assembled there. Very nice work to do.
The final contract for them was two town houses. Graeme Fox did this job for himself, and I have never seen a job with so many changes. I know Fox’s wife had very recently died of cancer, so that may have disturbed his mind.
Originally these houses were to have been sold off, but as they grew up he decided he would like to live one himself. His wife had been in a wheel chair for her last days and he realised the benefits of having house floors at ground floor. So the buildings were set down into the ground at the drive side. The perimeter walls were concrete blocks and then the ground dug out to 2ft down. When I asked about waterproofing the outside of the blockbase walls, they said it wasn’t necessary. A big mistake which caused them a lot of troubles later on. But I was not in on putting that lot right.
The two garages were originally to have been side by side and between the houses. But Fox decided to have the one in his house as a dining room, so made an opening from the lounge, with an elliptical arch over it. The door adjacent had also to become an arch to the top to match. This meant building a separate garage, which we put about 40ft from the house. This was connected with a wall to the house. This wall had a concrete path each side, and a cantilevered roof over the path so he could walk on the dry side no matter which way the rain came from.
The house roofs had a break in them being about 12 degree pitch for the lower half of their length, them about 30 degree pitch up to the ridge boards. The hip roof, originally to have been clad with Decramastic tiles, but about that time there was a lot of controversy shown on TV about the gravel washing off the tiles and blocking gutters and drains. So change that. But he chose Brown Built trough roofing which has to have the ends folded up. With all these hip ends the poor old plumber spent days cutting and bashing the ends up before each was laid. Then he had miles of ridging folded up and spent hours niching the vertical edges to fit over all the upstands in the roof sheets. He worked on those two roofs for 10 days.
Eventually the job got finished but only just in time, as Joan and I were booked on a trip to England so she could see her remaining relatives. Mostly cousins. In between Fox’s jobs, I was quite busy with other contracts. And when we came back, I had to add a room into the roof space of a house. This job went ok, but the next one was stuffed up by Manukau Council.
I was to build a new domestic garage, which the owners wanted tight to the back boundary and tight to the side boundary. This involved concrete block walls and the council wanted “engineers” design. They tried contacting the owners by phone but they were all at work all day. The council never thought of writing a letter or contacting the builder. When I finally contacted them, I was nearly ready to start. When the owner heard what they wanted and the possible extra costs, he canceled the job. So I was left with no work about a month before Christmas and nothing for January either. So I decide to get a job on wages.
The firm who employed me “Moselyn and Son” did almost all their work on secondary schools and tertiary institutions and school holidays were their busiest times. We got on well and I finally worked for them for 2 ½ years.