“How long does it take to build a house?” can be a little bit like asking “How long is a piece of string?” because naturally, home building times can vary depending on several factors. However, knowing roughly how long it takes to build a house is important for planning.
When you decide to build a new home, you need to consider things like your temporary accommodation. For your first home, you’re probably renting so you’d like your new home to be built around the time your current lease runs out. If you’ve sold an existing home and are staying with friends, family or other temporary accommodation, a quicker build is probably desirable.
So, to help manage your transition to a new home, it’s a good idea to understand just how long it will take.
What affects how long it takes to build a house?
There are so many factors that can impact a new house build’s time schedule. There are obvious unavoidable factors like weather. Poor weather can delay the laying of concrete slabs and also affect the house frame construction and bricklaying. Weather delays are to be expected, especially if building in the winter months. But realistically, bad weather should only hold up construction for a limited number of days.
But there are other factors to consider.
The land you’re building on
Of course, in an ideal world, we would all build our homes on perfectly flat parcels of land. With no major earthmoving works to be completed, house construction becomes a lot faster. But the reality is, that we’re not all blessed with a flat block of land.
When building on sloped or complex blocks of land, you may need significant earthworks completed before a slab can even be laid. Alternatively, even if the earthworks are minimal, the house design itself is probably going to be more complex to account for the grading of the land. So, this can cause the building to take a bit longer.
Site testing
While we’re on the topic of your land, another step in the building process is a site survey. This can include soil testing, water testing and checking for underground services such as power and gas. This site testing also assesses the quality of the site for load bearing.
While this is standard practice for all new home builds, it can cause delays if issues are uncovered. Here at Stonewood Homes, we conduct our site survey very early in the process for two reasons. Firstly, to identify any issues that may complicate the build. Secondly, to allow time for issues to be resolved during the planning phase so that building commencement is not compromised.
Council building consent
Before any home can be built in New Zealand, it requires council consent. Your building company will take care of this, and in most cases, there are no significant issues. The council has 20 working days from the time they receive your consent application to either approve or deny.
If consent is denied for some reason, this may further delay the building process. With that being said, when you deal with a professional building company they should have an exceptional knowledge about local council guidelines for consent, meaning applications should, in theory, be passed quite easily.
The design stage
Of course, we’re talking about the whole process of building a home, not just the time it takes once the ground is broken. A lot goes on behind the scenes before that point, and the biggest one is the house design.
The length of this stage can vary depending on the complexity of the designs. If you choose an off-the-shelf home design from a builder, you can slash this time considerably because most of the work is already done. However, when dealing with custom house designs, it can vary. The number of times you need to go back and forth with the architect for amendments will obviously slow down the process.
How long does building a house in NZ take?
In rare cases, the entire process before breaking ground on your new home build can take up to 4 months if there are problems, particularly with the council building consent. However, assuming everything goes well and the design process is fairly simple, you should be looking at around 2-3 months of planning before building commences.
From there, the slab pour can take around 4-8 weeks, but this all depends on the size of the home and the complexity of the design and site. After that, you should expect your home to be completed in 22-26 weeks. So, in total, once Building Consent is lifted, the building process usually takes around 6-8 months, give or take depending on the individual house in question.
Following that, you may need to wait up to 4 weeks for the council to issue your Code Compliance Certificate, which is required before handover can take place.
As with anything, there are a lot of variables, but a good guideline is to allow around 9 months for a new house build from your initial consultation to completion and handover. Once your builder knows exactly what you want, they should be able to give you an accurate timeline before building starts.
Looking to build your new home?
If you want your new home built fast, contact the friendly team at Stonewood. We’re not quick because we cut corners. Far from it, because the utmost attention to detail is applied for every home we build. Rather, our network is large enough to handle plenty of new home builds at once. So, you’ll never be left waiting around when you choose Stonewood Homes.
