Two years ago, a Dunedin couple wondered if they would ever catch a break.
After seeing their house and almost all their possessions go up in smoke, then discovering they were seriously underinsured, they got what they describe as the worst news of all. Their section had the highest lead contamination their consultants had ever seen on a residential property.
Three years on from the fire, Garry and Nancy Turner are putting the final touches to their new house and reflecting on the overwhelming support they have had from the public.
"I’m Dunedin born and bred and I’m a bit biased to be fair," Mr Turner says.
In November 2022, the Turners — he a teacher at King’s High School, she a teacher aide at Musselburgh Primary — had been living in their St Kilda home for 34 years. Although it was cold and leaked like a sieve, the 1914 villa held precious memories for them and their four children, the youngest of whom had been born in the lounge.
The house was mortgage-free but they had spent nothing on it, Mr Turner explains.
"We’d been poor through those times so we’d skimped and saved. Everything was about the kids.
"It was the worst house on the street, easy, but it was full of love."
Returning home on a Friday night, he plugged in a lithium power bank he’d bought to keep his cellphone charged; on Sunday morning, he and his wife drove across town to practise disc golf, the sport a grandson had just begun playing.
By the time they returned to their vehicle, Mr Turner had missed three phone calls from police; when they reached their Grove St home, the lounge was "toast"; the kitchen, "completely gone". Worried they were inside, neighbours had been banging on the door.
Insurance assessors attributed the fire to the power bank, while Fire and Emergency New Zealand suspected the problem was the junction box it had been plugged in to for 36 hours. Whatever the cause, about a third of the house was destroyed and almost everything in the rest of the property had to be thrown out, mainly because of smoke damage.
The most difficult thing was losing items they couldn’t replace — their children’s high school art portfolios, the door frame on which they’d recorded the children’s changing heights, the 500 books Mr Turner had collected and the 300 vintage dresses his wife had bought from op-shops over the years; galloping through the roof space and down into their wardrobe, the flames had melted coat hangers on to clothes.
For weeks, the couple tossed their belongings into skips and counted their blessings. While one side of their neighbour’s house had some charring, firefighters prevented the blaze from spreading to other properties. No-one was hurt. They’d also taken out the minimum amount of insurance needed in order to get a mortgage years before and, without really thinking about it, had continued paying the premiums.
Once that insurance was paid out and the house demolished, they bought a caravan to live in and approached architect Gary Todd, whom Mr Turner knew through touch rugby. The most they hoped for was advice but Todd offered to design a new house, handle the consent applications and keep an eye on the build for half his usual fee.
Finally it seemed they were going in the right direction but on February 15, 2024, they received the results of the soil testing which had been part of the consent process.
The lead contamination in the back garden was 26,000 parts per million — 124 times the 210ppm level considered "protective of human health" in a residential setting. Even when workers dug down to 0.6m, the concentration was still over 2400ppm.
"We were beyond devastated."
The property’s pear and apple trees were the first things to go. The caravan had to be moved from the back lawn to the concrete pad where their garage stood until the fire.
"They basically said that playing on the grass wasn’t safe," Mrs Turner says, adding their children had played cricket there for years when they were younger.
Disposing of the contaminated soil, which required special handling, would have resulted in not only a large hole but a substantial bill. Instead, experts recommended leaving almost all of it where it was but capping the site to ensure future occupants would not be exposed to the contamination.
This involved laying a waterproof capping — a high-density polyethylene liner covered with stone chip — at the back of the section and a permeable capping on the rest of the property where the pollution levels were lower. The total cost, including reports, council consents and drainage was about $80,000.
"That settled into my world view quite nicely. The universe was looking after us."
As for their new house, the couple say, "We wanted it to have some of us in it".
As well as painting doors, sealing plywood and installing insulation, the family shovelled 100 tonnes of stone chip on to the section, laid stormwater drains and built decks, fences, paths and planter boxes. Their sons-in-law did all the electrical work and Mr Turner reworked a second-hand kitchen — a "terrifying" prospect for a maths teacher.
But this story is as much about the community as their own efforts. Along with their "amazing" architect and Dan Johnson from GJ Gardner Homes, support came from neighbours, insurance company AMI, mortgage adviser Karl Larsen, Tile Space and Mosgiel Flooring, Musselburgh School and the "King’s family"— including a school counsellor who recognised they were suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
"We were living a life we didn’t know anything about and we weren’t ourselves. We had no resilience and even the smallest thing knocked us for six."
Aged in their early 60s, they have a $440,000 mortgage and face the prospect of working well past the official retirement age. However, they’re grateful to have a new home and are adamant they have "privileged" lives.
At 94sq m, plus a deck area of 50sq m, their new house has an open-plan kitchen-dining-living area in the centre and a bedroom and bathroom at each end.
The walls and ceilings are plywood with negative detailing. Kauri ceilings and rimu flooring salvaged from their old house will be made into barn doors and the living area was planned around the dimensions of their dining table, a family heirloom which can be wheeled out on to the 17m-long front deck.
While there is still work to do, the pair are enjoying comforts such as underfloor heating and a monsoon shower head — luxuries they could only dream of during their 18 months in a caravan.
There’s a gold coin in the foundations to bring them good luck and "love messages" from Mr Turner to his wife stowed under the carpet. But one thing is missing.
"We also don’t have things charging when we’re away or leave things plugged in and switched on."
After the fire, well-meaning people told them they wouldn’t know themselves when they got into their new house. In fact, the opposite was true.
It felt like home from the day they moved in.
"It’s not that we don’t know ourselves. It’s that we’ve found ourselves again," Mr Turner says.
"The place is healing us."
Sirens sounding daily
The situation faced by the Turners is repeated daily in one way or another up and down the country.
According to Fire and Emergency New Zealand, there were 177 fires in houses, flats and apartments in the Otago district last year and 2938 across New Zealand in 2024/25.
The Otago district includes Waitaki, Queenstown-Lakes, Central Otago, Clutha and Dunedin City.
Simple, efficient and ready to move
A focus on both simplicity and efficiency in the use of materials helped make this an affordable build, according to architect Gary Todd.
Designed as a rectangular form, with a single-storey, open-plan layout, the build required fewer tradespeople than most residential projects.
Prefabricated timber-framed walls and roof trusses were built off site and together with uniformly-sized plywood sheets installed in grids on the interior, helped reduce waste, time and construction costs.
The timber floor sits on rows of bearers and piles in strip concrete footings to counter any issues with the land’s load-bearing capacity.
The house is 60cm above street level and can be easily moved if South Dunedin were to be under water in the future.
"I consider this project a ‘rising from the ashes’," Todd says.
"So I thank Garry and Nancy for allowing me to guide them in their journey of renewal and resilience to once again have a place they can fondly call home.
