Reason tradies faced 'absolute challenge' fixing deceptively simple old hut

Yahoo

13 hours ago

Tradies have discovered that faithfully repairing a hut from the 1950s is more challenging than modern builds. The simple one-room dwelling had become dilapidated after decades of rain and wind that blast New Zealand's South Island.
Shooters employed to cull invasive red deer once lived in the historic Slaty Creek Hut near a river in the Grey Valley. They'd fashioned it by hand using available logs because there was no ability back in 1952 to carry or fly in materials from a sawmill, and they used a unique building method that was not found in the Northern Hemisphere.
In 2025, Mike Gillies, a Department of Conservation senior heritage advisor, was called in to advise rangers about specific historical building methods used to originally create the deceptively simple slab hut. 'For some reason, this really bizarre building type of building sprang out of our part of the world, and I don't know why,' he told Yahoo News.
Log cabins were widely used by pioneers in the United States and Canada, but slab huts, which are made from split timber, appear unique to Australia and New Zealand. Today, they're rare in New Zealand, and only 12 remain on public land across the entire South Island.
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DOC was adamant it didn't want to destroy the slab hut's original character by replacing its rotten beams with those cut with a machine. And so instead of quickly repairing the damage, Gillies schooled the rangers on how to break down beech logs and hew them into hand-shaped panels.
He delighted in watching how the two rangers, Casey Rhodes and Matt Ainge, reacted to his workshop. 'All of a sudden, they had a deep understanding of the craft, and they looked at the building in a completely different way,' he said.
He has run several workshops on bush carpentry and has seen the skills needed 'absolutely challenge modern tradies' for a number of reasons.
'You don't have modern power tools to break the timber down and manipulate it quickly. But also, it's slow and it's deliberate work,' he said. 'There's a real romanticism to that because it's really peaceful, quiet and considered. Whereas modern building sites are noisy and you're often working with chemically-treated materials.'
Gillies has a lot of respect for the men who worked in remote parts of the country and were able to fashion huts using only the materials they had around them.
'Builders aren't trained any more to use an adze to dress timber, they'll use a power plane. They won't use an axe to reduce the size of a post, they'll use a saw,' he said.
'These skills are becoming really rare. And the risk is we can't maintain these structures, or in the manner they deserve, adding in modern tools and materials and reducing its authenticity.'
The Slaty Creek Hut was constructed 50 years after the first high-rise, Cathedral House, was built in Auckland. The huts continued to be made simply out of necessity in the back country.
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Gillies suspects it was the development of the helicopter that led to the disappearance of the hand-hewn slab hut, as it quickly became easier to fly in pre-fabricated materials.
'Every time a job like this is done using modern tools or materials, you're one step closer to old crafts becoming extinct,' Gillies said.
'By learning how to do this work, the rangers will keep this craft alive. And next time another hut comes up in need of repair they'll have the understanding of how to fix it.'
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