Demolition team gets wrong bach

A bureaucratic bungle saw demolition men take to the wrong Coromandel holiday home this week.

But the owner of the bach doesn't know whether he's grateful or annoyed a neighbouring resident stopped the workers finishing what they'd started.

On Tuesday, contractors for the Thames Coromandel District Council went to the small seaside settlement of Colville with instructions to demolish an old bach at the end of Wharf Rd.

A curious neighbour watched as the workers took to his absent friend's holiday home.

About six sheets of rusty tin roof were torn from the house before an emergency call to the Hamilton-based property owner was made.

Tracey Cooper, chief reporter for the Waikato Times, received the early morning wake-up call.

While saying his house wasn't in a great state of repair, he certainly wasn't volunteering a destruction order.

He rushed to Colville to check the damage and to take the issue up with council managers.

"They got the wrong place. It was full of rust ... and it's probably prompted me to do something about it now. If he [the neighbour] hadn't seen it happening they would've taken the whole place down."

The contractors were meant to have demolished a house on the opposite side of the road, which Mr Cooper said was probably in a better shape than his own.

He explained there was pressure on him to improve his bach's condition. If it had been flattened he could have claimed compensation, or even asked for a new house to be built, courtesy of the council.

"I'm pretty pissed off with my neighbour really, because it's a leaky, rusty, rotten old bach."

At least he had a partly new roof now, he said. Council communications spokesman Peter Hazael said second-hand iron sheets from the house that was earmarked for demolition were used to replace Mr Cooper's roof.

Some of the initial confusion had perhaps come about because the houses were the same colour. But a "please explain" was still being issued to the contractors.

A destruction order was made because a couple, aged in their 80s, had laid claim to the old bach that was actually sited on council land.

The couple had agreed to the removal of their bach after lengthy discussions with the council.