THE BIG MOVE
A mate of mine called his house-moving contractor the other day to get a date for his job and was told: “Sorry, we have 72 ahead of yours, so we can’t give you a date.”
That was just one company riding the house-relocating boom in New Zealand, and illustrates why TVNZ took on Clarke Gayford’s 12-episode series, Moving Houses. There’s big bucks in it.
There are house-moving contractors in every major centre, all competing for listings. Business is brisk due to the high cost of building new or just buying an existing house, and because most of our houses are wooden and moveable. The sophisticated lifting and trucking technology used has been developed here and is sold worldwide.
The TV series was pretty “gee-whizz”, tackling all kinds of terrain for every imaginable end result. The reality for the customer can be quite different.
The house-moving business is visually dramatic, and every good keen DIYer harbours dreams of doing a relocation project, thinking it looks fairly straightforward and cheaper than building a house. Sometimes it is.
There is nothing quite like that pre-dawn phone call from the pilot vehicle: “Your house is on the move as we speak!” Or the moment, probably watched with a crowd of friends and neighbours, when the convoy of trucks, illuminated by banks of flashing
