Joanne & Steve Hilson – House Renovated While Being on Holiday
Quick answer: Joanne and Steve Hilson had their Greenlane home renovated in 2019 while they were on holiday. An open-plan kitchen, a laundry conversion, a consented new ensuite and a renovated guest toilet were all completed with the owners out of the country, because every selection was locked in first and one project manager owned the schedule, the trades and the council communication.
Most people picture a renovation as something they live through. Dust sheets in the hallway, a kettle on a card table, a shower they cannot use. That is one way to do it, and we have a whole guide on how to live in your house while it is being renovated.
Joanne and Steve went the other way. They handed over the keys to their Greenlane house, flew out, and came back to a finished renovation. Below is what was actually done, in their words and ours, and what has to be in place before a build can run without you standing in it.
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Joanne & Steve Hilson
Video testimonial by Joanne & Steve Hilson for their House Renovation completed by Superior Renovations ® located in Greenlane, Auckland.
“Knowing that we weren’t there while it was being done as well was the best part, we were on the beach, and the renovation will be done”
“Working with Kevin and the team was easy because we weren’t having to ring up different suppliers ourselves, it was like one team does this, another team does that – and everything was done for us under one roof. Kevin had a contact for everything, and the experience was simple. You hear a lot of horror stories about doing renovations and I was like, well that was very easy”
What Was Renovated in the Greenlane House
The job started as a kitchen and a toilet and finished as a whole-house renovation. That is a very ordinary path in Auckland’s established suburbs, where one dated room usually turns out to be attached to three others.
The renovation included:
- Kitchen Renovation
- Removal of wall to become an open plan
- Bathroom Renovation
- Toilet Renovation
- Addition of a New Toilet
- New Laundry
- New Custom Storage Area
- Consent Process
A new rumpus room, fresh flooring and a full repaint went in as well. The project was completed in October 2019 and project managed by Kevin Yang. The full build story, room by room, sits on the Greenlane full home renovation case study.
💡 Quick tip: If your list has a kitchen and a bathroom on it, price the whole house before you commit to a single room. The trades, the consent and the project management all get cheaper per room the more rooms they cover.
It Started With One Toilet, Not a Design Brief
Joanne and Steve bought the Greenlane house as a rental. The plan was a permanent move to the UK, with the property earning its keep in the background while they were away. Then the move fell through, and the investment became the house they were going to live in.
Coming out of a modern Auckland home, the gap showed straight away.
“So when we decided that the move was not going to happen, we were stuck with this. I mean it was okay, it was just not very modern. We had come from a very modern house into an older house, so I wanted to add that modern touch to it. I think the toilet was the most important to us. We had come from a house that had multiple toilets to a place with just one toilet. So that was the kickstart of the whole renovation.”
— Joanne Hilson, Greenlane
Steve’s version was shorter, and it was about the kitchen. “The kitchen was old, and coming from a new house – I mean we’re not cooking buffets at all, but we like a nice kitchen.”
One toilet in a household used to several is not a design problem. It is a queue at 7am. If a second toilet is what has you reading this, the numbers and the consent rules are set out in our guide to what it costs to install a new toilet in Auckland.
Opening Up a Closed-Off Kitchen and Laundry
The kitchen was not falling apart. Old laminate benchtops, yellowing cabinets with brown handles, a square-tiled splashback, tired flooring. It worked. For two people who had just come out of a new build, working was not the standard.
The real problem was that the room was shut off from the rest of the house. So the first move was structural: the wall between the lounge and the kitchen came out, and two boxed-in rooms became one space. That made a breakfast bar with stools possible, which suits how Joanne and Steve actually use the room far better than a closed galley ever did.
Taking out an internal wall is the point where a cosmetic job becomes a building job. Whether the wall is load bearing decides everything that follows: a beam, a producer statement from an engineer, sometimes a consent. That assessment gets made on site before anything is priced, which is one of the reasons we ask to walk through a house rather than quote off a photo. If your kitchen is the closed-off room in your house, this is what it takes to pull the wall out and rebuild the kitchen as one open space.
The laundry was folded into the same programme, along with a custom storage area, because the trades were already on site and the cabinetry was already being made.
The Ensuite That Needed Council Consent
The second toilet was not a swap. A brand-new ensuite where no bathroom had existed before means a new connection to the water supply and the wastewater line, and that needs a building consent from Auckland Council.
Consent changes the shape of a renovation in three ways. There is a design and documentation stage before anything starts. There is a processing wait at council. And there are inspections at set points during the build that have to be booked, met and passed before the next trade can start. Get that sequence wrong and the job stops, whether you are in the country or not.
This is exactly the part Joanne and Steve did not want to hold. The consent process, the council communication and the inspection bookings sat with their project manager. Our renovation consent process walks through what that looks like end to end, and where a project genuinely needs a bathroom built to code, here is how we add an ensuite where there wasn’t one before.
Important note: Whether your specific project needs a consent, and which parts of it count as Restricted Building Work, is a call for Auckland Council or a Licensed Building Practitioner on your actual plans. Do not treat a general answer from a website, ours included, as clearance to start.
Can You Renovate While You Are Away? What Has to Be Locked Down First
Yes, and Joanne and Steve are the proof. But “we went on holiday and it got done” is the outcome, not the method. Six things have to be settled before you get on a plane.
Every selection is decided before you leave
This is the one that stops most people. A renovation runs on decisions, and a decision made late costs money and time. Tiles, tapware, benchtop, cabinetry finish, handles, paint colours, flooring, lighting, the position of every power point. All of it needs signing off while you are still sitting in front of someone who can show you the options.
We design in-house before a build starts for exactly this reason. Our designers are in the first meeting rather than brought in after a price is agreed, so the specification is settled and the price is attached to a decided design instead of an allowance. That is what makes a build possible without you: there is nothing left to ask.
One person owns the schedule, the trades and the council
In 2019 we split project management out of sales and gave it its own department. The reason was simple. In a lot of renovation companies the person who sold you the job stays loosely attached through the build, so the people closest to winning the work are not the ones accountable for delivering it. That gap is where timelines slip and communication goes quiet.
Your project manager builds the trade sequence and holds it. You cannot tile before the plumber has roughed in, and you cannot paint before the plasterer has finished. They book the trades and order the materials so things arrive when the site is ready rather than a month early. They handle the day-to-day communication between you, the council and the designers, including coordinating the consent. And they manage the site managers running the physical work.
How that department came about is written up in our own account of why we separated project management from sales. When you are overseas, that single point of accountability stops being a nice feature and becomes the whole thing.
You agree how a variation gets approved before you need one
Something will come up. A pipe in the wrong place, a rotten sill, old wiring that cannot legally be reconnected. If you are in Whitianga or Bali, the question is not whether you will be asked. It is how fast you can answer, and what happens on site while you do.
Settle this in writing: who can approve a variation, up to what value, and by what method. Email approval with a written price attached, checked against the contract, is the version that holds up later. A verbal yes on a bad line is not.
The contract is signed and it covers the whole scope
For residential building work at or over $30,000 including GST, a written contract is a legal requirement in New Zealand, and you are entitled to a disclosure statement and a consumer protection checklist before you sign. MBIE sets out what has to be in it and why on building.govt.nz, along with the disclosure and checklist requirements.
Read the payment schedule properly before you travel. If a progress payment falls due while you are away, you want to know that now. We have written up the whole document in what to get in writing before you sign a renovation contract.
Site access, keys and security are arranged, not assumed
Someone needs a key, and it should be a named person rather than “the builder”. Agree who holds it, how the house is locked at the end of each day, what happens to anything you have left inside, and whether your insurer needs to know the property will be unoccupied and under construction. That last one catches people out. Ring your insurer before you book the flights, not after.
You get updates on a schedule, not on request
Chasing updates from another time zone is miserable. Agree the rhythm up front: a weekly written update with photos, plus a call at the milestones that matter. Joanne and Steve’s read on it afterwards was that they were not ringing suppliers themselves. One team did one thing, another did the next, and it was handled under one roof.
Which Renovations Suit Being Away, and Which Do Not
Being off-site is not equally sensible for every job. The pattern we see is fairly consistent.
| Type of work | Suits being away? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Full house strip-out and rebuild | Strongly | The house is unliveable anyway, and the specification is settled before demolition starts. |
| Whole-house repaint and new flooring | Strongly | Fumes, dust and drying times are far easier to manage with nobody in the house. |
| Kitchen replacement in a decided layout | Yes | Cabinetry is made to a signed drawing, so there is little left to decide on site. |
| Bathroom or ensuite built under consent | Yes, with a project manager | Council inspections have to be booked and met on time. Someone has to own that. |
| Character villa or bungalow restoration | With care | Older substrates throw up more surprises, so expect more variation calls while you are away. |
| Design still unresolved when you leave | No | Selections made remotely from photographs are the single biggest source of regret. |
Notice what the “no” row has that nothing else on the list has. It is not about the type of work. It is about whether the thinking was finished before the tools arrived.
What a Full Home Renovation in Central Auckland Actually Covers
Greenlane sits in the belt of established central-Auckland suburbs where most houses are old enough to need work and good enough to be worth it. Remuera, Epsom, Ellerslie, Mt Eden, One Tree Hill. The renovation brief in those streets tends to look the same from the outside and behave differently once the linings come off.
A whole-house renovation in this part of Auckland usually means some combination of a kitchen, one or two bathrooms, a laundry, flooring and paint, plus whatever the walls are hiding. Older homes here commonly need wiring brought up to current standards, insulation added where there is none, and plumbing replaced rather than extended. If a wall is coming out, an engineer gets involved.
The reason we quote that as one project rather than a stack of separate jobs is sequencing. Kitchen and bathroom renovations share the same plumber, the same electrician, the same tiler, the same waterproofer and the same painter. Running them together shortens the programme and cuts the number of times a trade has to come back. Doing them a year apart means paying for the same mobilisation twice.
If you are weighing up one room against the lot, start with what a whole-house renovation in central Auckland actually covers and put your own numbers through the calculators. Once the build is finished, the renovation aftercare guide covers what to look after in the first year.
The Part Joanne and Steve Rated Most
It was not the kitchen. It was not the ensuite that finally ended the single-toilet problem. It was the fact that the whole thing happened while they were on a beach.
That only works when the design is finished, the contract is signed, the consent is being driven by someone whose job it is, and one named person is holding the schedule. Get that right and being away stops being a risk and starts being the easiest way to renovate.
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Can you renovate a house while you are on holiday or overseas?
Yes. Joanne and Steve Hilson had their Greenlane home renovated in 2019 while they were away, including an open-plan kitchen, a laundry conversion, a consented new ensuite and a renovated guest toilet. It works when every selection is signed off before you leave, the contract and payment schedule are agreed, and one project manager owns the trade sequence, the materials and the council communication while you are gone.
What has to be decided before you leave the country?
Every specification decision. Tiles, tapware, benchtop, cabinetry finish, handles, paint colours, flooring, lighting and the position of every power point. A renovation runs on decisions, and a decision made late from a photograph on your phone is the most common source of regret. Design the job fully before demolition starts and there is nothing left to ask you.
Who lets the council inspector in if I am away?
Your project manager. A consented job has inspections at set points, and each one has to be booked and met before the next trade can start. On the Greenlane renovation the consent process, the council communication and the inspection bookings all sat with the project manager rather than the owners. Confirm in writing who holds that responsibility before you travel.
Do I need building consent to add a new ensuite or a second toilet?
Adding a sanitary fixture where one did not previously exist needs a building consent from Auckland Council, because it creates a new connection to the water supply and the wastewater line. A like-for-like replacement in the same position generally does not. Whether your specific plans need consent, and which parts count as Restricted Building Work, is a call for the council or a Licensed Building Practitioner on your drawings.
Do I need a written contract for a renovation in New Zealand?
For residential building work at or over $30,000 including GST, a written contract is a legal requirement, and you are entitled to a disclosure statement and a consumer protection checklist before you sign. MBIE sets out what the contract has to contain on building.govt.nz. Read the payment schedule before you travel so you know whether a progress payment falls due while you are away.
How do variations get approved when I am not there?
Agree the mechanism before you go: who can approve a variation, up to what value, and by what method. Email approval with a written price attached, checked against the contract, is the version that holds up later. Something will come up on any older home, so the useful question is not whether you will be asked but how quickly you can answer.
Should I tell my insurer the house will be empty during the renovation?
Yes, and do it before you book flights rather than after. An unoccupied house under construction is a different risk from an occupied home, and insurers set their own conditions on both. Also agree who holds a key, how the house is locked at the end of each day, and what happens to anything you leave inside.
What was included in the Greenlane renovation?
An open-plan kitchen created by removing the wall between the kitchen and lounge, a laundry conversion, a custom storage area, a brand-new ensuite that required council consent, a renovated guest toilet, a new rumpus room, new flooring and a full repaint. It was completed in October 2019 and project managed by Kevin Yang from start to finish.
Is it cheaper to renovate a kitchen and bathroom at the same time?
Usually, because they share trades. The same plumber, electrician, tiler, waterproofer and painter work on both, so running them in one programme shortens the build and cuts the number of times each trade has to return to site. Doing them a year apart means paying for the same mobilisation twice. Put both through our cost calculators before you decide to split them.
Which renovations are the worst ones to be away for?
Any job where the design is still unresolved when you leave. The type of work matters less than whether the thinking was finished before the tools arrived. Full strip-outs, whole-house repaints and kitchens built to a signed drawing all run well without you. A half-decided renovation does not, wherever you are.
Further Resources for your home renovation
- Featured projects and Client stories to see specifications on some of the projects.
- Real client stories from Auckland
Need more information?
Take advantage of our FREE Complete Home Renovation Guide (48 pages), whether you’re already renovating or in the process of deciding to renovate, it’s not an easy process, this guide which includes a free 100+ point check list – will help you avoid costly mistakes.
Download Free Renovation Guide (PDF)
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