A community effort to rebuild a South Dunedin home is giving the owners renewed hope for the future following the trauma of October’s floods.
Nelson St resident Marion McManus is urging Dunedin’s elected officials to return to basics and look after their ratepayers as she and her husband Tony prepare their home for future floods.
For about seven weeks, a small group of neighbours and volunteers have been working on significant renovations to the couple’s 1910s home - aiming to lift the floor by 80cm throughout the house.
When the Otago Daily Times visited yesterday, nearly half of the rooms had been raised and work was expected to be completed by Christmas.
"It's just amazing, the difference — it's like, ‘yeah, there is hope’."
The McManuses bought their "forever home" in 2019 and while they knew it had been affected by the 2015 floods, they believed it was a "one-off" event aggravated by infrastructure issues.
"The likelihood of it happening again in this street ... I thought, was fairly low," Mrs McManus said.
However, during record rainfall in October the couple self-evacuated, staying with a friend, then in a motel before returning to their yellow-stickered property about New Year.
Mrs McManus said sandbags had stopped the worst of the deluge but water 20cm deep had flooded the house.
After discussions with builder Ken Close, the couple decided to put their insurance payout towards raising the floor rather than fixing the damaged house like-for-like, as neighbours had.
"It was hard work sitting in a motel and watching other people moving back into their places, but then we thought, well, ‘we're going to hopefully be making the place better for a longer term’," Mrs McManus said.
The payout would not have covered the labour to raise the floors — instead volunteers, such as Mr Close and Lindsay Sherer, and neighbours were working on the project free of charge.
"There's people that are just helping us all over the place, and for which we are just so, so very grateful," Mrs McManus said.
Since October, she spoke regularly to a counsellor and her doctor. She and her husband were stressed but they now felt they were taking action.
"On the other side of the road, life could go on pretty much as normal [after the October floods]," she said.
"I've got friends over there, and they didn't suffer the trauma, they don't stay awake at night when it's raining, thinking ‘is it safe’?"
As renovations on their home continued, the McManuses felt they had an end goal in sight.
"It’s actually given us our confidence back a bit and our resilience — it's given us hope," she said.
Mrs McManus said she hoped the renovation meant the couple would be "high and dry" in any future floods and urged Dunedin’s elected officials and council staff to focus on looking after ratepayers.
"Come back to basics, come back to the grassroots, the people that they're supposedly elected for, the people who vote for them to go in," she said.
Mr Close said there had been a steady stream of builders looking in on the project to see how it was being done.
"We knew it had been flooded before, but we didn't think it was going to happen again — usually cities rally around and fix the problem so things don't get flooded," he said.
Working on the project was a great way to help the couple and he had jumped at the challenge of working on the house.
