I’m Dave, and I’ve spent close to eighteen years building and repairing decks around Papamoa and the wider Bay of Plenty coast. Every summer I get asked the same thing, usually while we’re standing on a deck that’s gone silver and splintery after a few seasons under that fierce Papamoa sun: “should we have gone…

A deck was top of our wish list when we bought in Papamoa, Bay of Plenty — I had this whole picture of summer evenings out the back. Then the quotes started landing and I nearly fell over. One builder said $12,000, another said $28,000, and for weeks I couldn’t work out why two people…

A mate of mine bought an exposed section up in Tawa a couple of years back, right where the gully funnels the northerly straight off the harbour. He put up a nice 1.8-metre paling fence — a straightforward timber boundary fence — for a bit of privacy, and by the second winter half of it…

I’ve spent years as a builder working around Mosgiel and the wider Taieri, just out on Dunedin’s flat side, and if there’s one call I get on repeat, it’s the one my sister-in-law made me last spring. She’d had a builder quote a low deck off the back of her place and a new fence…

My name’s Grant Hollis, and I’ve spent close on 25 years building decks and outdoor timber structures around Wellington’s harbour edge, Petone included. The first deck I built here faced dead south across the harbour — looked a picture in the brochure the owners had in their heads. The reality was that for about eight…