By Fiona Gillies
March 08, 2009 12:00am
NOT long ago, Martin Ismay would look out his back door and see a plain suburban steel fence. These days, from that same back door, he sees cows and countryside.
So what has changed?
Ismay and his wife Sonya are among around 200 people in NSW last year who relocated a house to a new piece of land.
In the Ismays’ case it was their own home, moving it from Sydney to the Hunter Valley, but many more people take on someone else’s unwanted house and give it new life in a different place.
With demolition costs as high as $20,000, people are often happy to give a house away when they want to rebuild. The company moving the house then bears the cost of clearing the block and makes its money relocating the home for someone else.
But when research shows moving house is one of life’s most stressful events, what happens when moving house literally means moving a house - chopping it into pieces, transporting it on the back of a truck, then putting it back together again?
It’s not as stressful as it might sound and those who have done it heap praise on the experience, citing it as an affordable, environmentally sound, community-minded way to get a home with character.
Your Space spoke to three residents and a house-moving company to find out more.
The McKillops
Don McKillop’s family has been relocating houses for three generations.
Now running Housemoving Contractors Pty Ltd (www.housemovingcontractors.com.au) with his son, Scott, and daughter-in-law Maree, McKillop moves around 20 houses a year, mostly from Sydney into country areas.
“You can move just about anything except full brick homes,” he says. “It’s fibro, it’s brick veneers, it’s weatherboards.” A house must be stable, in reasonable condition with a good kitchen and bathroom, and must sit on piers so moving equipment can be put underneath. “I probably look at 25 houses a month and I’m likely to get two out of 25,” says McKillop.
His company, based in St Albans, north-west of Sydney, has an email list of people waiting for properties. Information on each new acquisition is sent to those on the list. Council approvals are similar to those required when building a new home. Once a buyer is found, and red tape sorted, the house is reinforced with internal frames, cut into two to four pieces, depending on its size - to comply with RTA width restrictions – then transported by truck to its new location.
On arrival, the McKillops rejoin the house and lower it onto new footings. Says Maree McKillop: “We don’t construct the footings or brickwork and we don’t join the electrical or do plumbing. Those are specialised trades and we don’t get involved.” The McKillops generally charge $50,000 to $70,000 for their part of the move, depending on the number of cuts and the distance travelled. Beyond that, the buyer takes care of services, renovations and cosmetic work. “To finish the whole thing, till you’re sitting in an armchair, generally works out at around $110,000 to $120,000,” says Don McKillop.
“For that you usually get a reasonably nice three- to four-bedroom home, with a reasonably modern kitchen and bathroom.” Maree McKillop says before choosing a house mover, ask for references and talk to people who’ve dealt with the company.
“If there’s damage in the move, then something you’ve done as affordable housing can see you end up with a lot of repair bills,” she says. Fortunately, bad-news stories are a rarity. The Office of Fair Trading says it has received no complaints about house movers in recent years.
The Ismays
Sentimentality was the driving force behind Martin and Sonya Ismay’s decision to shift their three-bedroom weatherboard house from Oatley, in Sydney’s south, to Millfield, near Cessnock.
“I took 10 years to renovate the house and we just didn’t have the heart to knock it over, but we wanted to clear the block to build a new family home,” Martin says. The Ismays set themselves a $100,000 budget to buy land, found a quarter-acre (1000sq m) block in Millfield, then contacted Robert Mannix Relocations (0412 698 864).
Mannix cut their house into three pieces and relocated it to the new block for around $50,000. Since then, the Ismays have spent $20,000 to $30,000 on services and improvements. “You could do it for cheaper but my heart’s attached to this rather than my head,” says Martin. “Both my kids were born there and grew up there and you just want to do as good a job as you can.” Daughters Lucy, 11 and Ruby, 7 are delighted with the new location. “They were very upset when we told them we planned to knock it over, so they’re ecstatic our family home just lives on a different block of land,” Martin says.
The Ismays are now selling the house to help fund their new Sydney home, but Martin is philosophical. “The main purpose was just not to knock it down,” he says.
Lisa Brown
Recycling a home fitted right in with Lisa Brown’s green ethics. Working for an environmental consultancy in Port Macquarie, Brown encourages local government and businesses to recycle more and reduce what goes to landfill – and she recently studied waste management overseas on a Churchill Fellowship.
So when she and her then partner, Patrick Edwards, wanted a house on their land at Wauchope, she decided to practise what she preaches. “It’s a crazy waste of resources to have houses demolished when people want to upgrade, so it’s sort of the ultimate in recycling to take a perfectly good house and give it a second life,” she says.
Brown and Edwards paid Housemoving Contractors $65,000 to relocate their chosen house from Sydney’s Riverwood to their mid-north coast land. She estimates that the final cost will be $50,000 less than if they had built from scratch. “And I don’t think we would have got such a nice house. The cheapest ones to build are those generic project homes, whereas this one is really nice.”
If they hadn’t installed solar panels and a water tank, they could have saved even more, she says. Brown says one bonus of the move is that it fostered a great sense of community. The family she bought the house from were happy their well-loved and well-kept home was getting a new life, and are keen to see it in its new location. And neighbours in Riverwood and Wauchope have been very interested in the process. “The idea of recycling a home makes sense to people,” says Brown. “It taps into something and captures their imaginations so they come out and have a look."
The Nichols
Bill and Annette Nichols were after a home “with character” to put on the two hectares they had bought for their retirement at Invergowrie, just outside Armidale. Bill calculated that to build a three-bedroom timber home surrounded by verandas would cost somewhere between $280,000 and $400,000. Instead, the Nichols found a charming 1930s timber house with high ceilings through the Housemoving Contractors email list.
Moving it from Newcastle to Invergowrie cost $55,000 and Bill, a Sydney-based truckie, estimates he will have spent another $80,000 by the time it is finished, complete with his yearned-for wide verandas.
He says he would recommend the experience to anyone, particularly if they can wait for the right house to come up. “We had the leisure of sitting back and choosing exactly what we wanted,” says Bill, who took three or four months to find the right house. “We probably looked at 20 before this one. It was the style we wanted. It just clicked.”
Any negatives?
“The time span from when you choose the house until you get it to your property is quite tight. Bearing in mind that the people getting rid of the house want it gone, you still have to do the process through council so it’s very pressured.
Not from the house movers. It’s just the way it is.”
