Renovating a 1920s Auckland villa

A 1920s Auckland villa is a timber-framed, weatherboard-clad house on piles, with a corrugated or tiled roof, sarked ceilings, no insulation as built, and joinery that has been painted twenty times. What follows is what a competent quote will have looked at, roughly in descending order of how much it moves the number.

1. Piles and subfloor. Original piles are often timber, often short of modern bracing requirements, and sometimes no longer carrying what they were meant to. Re-piling and adding bracing is structural work, and it decides whether the floor you level stays level.
2. Load paths, if you are opening up. Villa internal walls commonly carry roof load. A new opening means a beam, and a beam means getting its load down to something that can take it. This is engineered, consented, restricted building work.
3. Framing and borer at the base of walls and around wet areas. Localised, repairable, and impossible to price accurately until the linings are off. This is the classic allowance line.
4. Wiring and switchboard. Anything of that era has been added to repeatedly. A partial rewire that meets current requirements is often more disruptive than a full one.
5. Plumbing and drainage. Galvanised supply and earthenware drainage both have a service life, and both are behind or under something.
6. Insulation, glazing and the comfort question. Insulating a villa is retrofitted into walls that were built to breathe. Done badly it traps moisture; done well it changes how the house lives. This is a design decision, not a product decision.
7. Lead paint. Pre-1980 paintwork should be assumed to contain lead until tested, which changes how preparation is done and disposed of, inside and out.
8. Joinery and finishes. The part everyone budgets for, and the part that matters least to whether the house works.

The pattern: on a villa, the expensive items are the ones you cannot see and the visible ones are comparatively cheap. On a 1998 plaster-clad townhouse the pattern is closer to the reverse and the downside is far worse. What a reclad involves.

A Special Character Area overlay generally concerns itself with two things: demolition, and changes to the external appearance of a building as seen from the street. That is why the standard Auckland villa strategy is to leave the front two rooms and the street elevation broadly alone and do the work at the back — it is not aesthetic conservatism, it is the path of least consenting resistance.

An overlay does not stop you renovating. It adds a resource consent question on top of your building consent question, with its own assessment and its own timeline, and it makes what you propose to the street a design matter rather than a free choice.

The counts on this site are suburb-level aggregates. They cannot tell you whether your section is inside an overlay. Check the overlay status of your suburb, then ask Auckland Council about your address.