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Daniel Hutchinson From The Hutch |
Please don't tell anyone but there is half a sheet of plasterboard propped up against the wall in the garage.
I'm no plasterboard snob, this isn't GIB, it's a French substitute called ProRoc. In the New Zealand building fraternity, that's a bit like turning up to a superyacht party with a bottle of Squealing Pig Rosē instead of Champagne.
But this isn't a case of chalk and cheese – it's just chalk and it's cheaper.
Usually, I throw stuff like that away at the end of a project because over the years I've grown to hate clutter. What's the point of storing a $10 piece of plasterboard for years on end?
It never used to be like that and there was a time when I wouldn't throw anything away. In fact, I was quite a messy teenager right up until I was 19 – the year of the cat and the Holden Gemini.
The Holden was mine, but the cat belonged to no one. It must have thought all its Christmases had come at once when it found a window open and snuck inside. It fed on KFC bones and pie crumbs before settling in for a snooze on the back seat.
When I jumped in the car, and turned on the ignition, all hell broke loose and to a casual observer, the sight of a panicked young man throwing himself out of a car door, with a demented furball bouncing off his head, would have been a fascinating and amusing way to start the day.
That was the first of many lessons I learned about cleaning up as you go along.
By the time the Queen of decluttering, Marie Kondo, arrived on the scene I was easy pickings to become a devoted disciple.
Keeping it clean
But building supplies have always been a tricky area. There are few things more annoying than having to buy something, when you know you threw the same thing away 18 months earlier.
However, it's a fine line between having too much and not having it at all. If you have too many things stored away in case you might need them one day, eventually you can't find anything anyway.
Buying something you know you have but can't find is more annoying than buying something you know you don't have because you threw it away.
So, it's rare to have half a sheet of plasterboard leaning up against a wall for months on end but these are strange times.
The issue is that I need a dozen sheets of plasterboard to finish the ceiling in the garage and we are in the middle of a plasterboard crisis.
When this pandemic first started, I was nervous about the future like everyone else, but never in my worst nightmares did I think it would affect my ability to renovate. A do-it-yourself attitude was the only thing keeping me going during the long days of Covid confinement.
Little did I know dark forces were at play. More than 90 per cent of plasterboard used in New Zealand is made by Winstone Wallboards – manufacturers of the GIB brand – and they have been struggling to keep up with demand since the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020.
They have a new $400 million factory in Tauriko, due to open next year, but that is not soon enough for the building industry. It's the toilet paper phenomenon all over again – only it's not just builders' cracks at stake, it's builders' livelihoods.
White gold
Many of those that can get their hands on this white gold are stockpiling it, further distorting the market. But that's not the only problem.
For reasons related to the ‘leaky homes' saga of the 1990s, builders can only use the product specified on their building consent. So, if you say you are going to use GIB board, then that's what you must use – even if there is a comparable product available.
It's great that Kiwi-made products like GIB board are so well supported but if there are comparable products available, then we should be facilitating that with some urgency, in the interests of competition.
In the meantime, I'll stay out of the plasterboard market until things return to normal. My project isn't urgent, I have close family in the building industry and having half a sheet of plasterboard in the garage is a bit of a status symbol.
I can always slice it up and serve it with Squealing Pig.
daniel@thesun.co.nz
