Frank Greenall: What about hands on homes?

Frank Greenall

I'M GRATEFUL the Olympics only last a fortnight -- watching all that highly fraught determination to propel bodies, horses and bicycles higher, farther or faster, and the frenzied coercing of objects of varying sizes into constricted apertures takes a harrowing toll.

It's strange the way we continue to celebrate the hands-on grunt, grit and general expertise involved with sport but have singularly abandoned many similar hands-on, can-do survival skills that helped define us as a nation.

Case in point. The largely self-created hothouse abomination of the rampant Auckland housing market.

The media naturally gravitate towards aberrant situations so, of course, they're in like Flynn. And a regular cliche in portraying this dysfunctionality is to track a distressed and disillusioned couple doing the rounds of house auctions chasing their first property foothold.

Another example popped up last week -- albeit in a more contextualised manner, as part of the excellent series exploring the evolution of the "New Zealand Home". The couple in question trotted out the familiar tale of woe, the demoralising weekend traipses and auction shootouts. But good news -- they eventually succeeded.

For about $700,000 they scored a little suburban box of a house that looked as though it was built circa 1950s. Solid, but basic as -- literally box-shaped with maybe one bedroom, and a sun room that could double as a second when baby arrived. The sort of house, in fact, that could well have been hand-built by the original owners.

Only a few generations ago, this is what a lot of us did. We built our own houses. As a young married man, later prime minister, Norman Kirk hand-built his own family home at Kaiapoi while working fulltime.

With maybe a bit of a loan and a collection of materials -- some new, usually some second-hand -- and the help of a few friends and rellies, it was considered no big deal.

A bit of a rough sketch, and someone in the local council building consents office would often help knock it into a presentable plan. Then you'd proceed to put together a basic core structure that would be a meantime roof over the head for the new couple, and which could be extended as the family grew.

Which begs the question ... what if the TV couple -- instead of spending countless hours and weekends doing the rounds of open homes, auctions, juggling figures and dicking with banks trying to arrange a mortgage that wouldn't bankrupt them -- had simply got hold of a few of the basic non-power tools that were used to build the structure in the first place, and spent the same time knocking a box up themselves.

Sure, they'd need a section, but with a few tips here and there, it's not hard for an amateur to build a comfortable, sturdy water-proof box to a standardised modular design pre-approved (and later inspected) by local council.

It's only when you want to build a disastrous leaky home box that you need specialist professional qualifications and accompanying local council incompetence.

And boxes are very fashionable at the moment. Look at many of the latest house designs -- they're basically a series of boxes joined together and capped with sloping flat roofs, the easiest roof of all.

But the meme that says it's perfectly sound, sensible and relatively cheap to get a roof over your head by DIY if supported by user-friendly systems seems to, by and large, have left the culture.

And, sadly, what's replaced it is a capitulation to a life of financial servitude reminiscent of the feudal relationship between serf and baron -- except for baron now read bank.

It's salutary to recall the derivation of the term "mortgage" -- it's from old French, and literally means pact to the death. With many, for both relationships and individuals, the pressure of the mega-mortgage means that's exactly the way things often pan out.