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Summer moved on in a blaze of heat. The weather was so unfailingly good that work quickly progressed on the building sites. The areas for the mall and the street for the houses were cleared quickly, with no hold up from the weather. Stuart Larcombe quickly solved the inevitable bureaucratic delays allowing the labour force to come from China on fixed term visas. Frank knew that the cement company in Vietnam who had previously financed much of their work pulled out when Stuart Larcombe insisted on Chinese supplies. He assumed Larcombe’s new contact. Mr Xi Wei, was supplying finance and dealing with bureaucracy at his end in China.
Frank hired big machinery to build the roads he needed; an access road from the valley floor, diagonally upwards to the west from the stub of road that had been there from the early days to level off then run slightly uphill parallel to the road on the valley floor. Frank could build houses on either side of the road, above his roadway and below. Long driveways were driven off the new road, leading up and down the slope the hill in a herring bone pattern to lessen the effect of heavy rain. That meant Frank could place two houses above the road and two below.
The area he decided to develop first seemed to him to be on quite stable land. Frank was neither a geologist nor a civil engineer but he was a good builder who had been building houses for a long time. Nestled together in groups of four houses, the footings should be quite safe and should not require pinning to bed rock. He thought that he could drive a new road down from the road along the ridge at the top, to make three cul de sac entries for four houses at a time. These probably would require to be pinned.
Frank decided to leave the first four houses in a cul de sac from the existing top road until later. It turned out to be a wise decision. The cul de sac was made but no houses were built there. Below his new road leading across the hillside, Frank found that the contour of the ground allowed for two more houses, making ten in all for the lower development of stage one.
At the mall site, things progressed quite smoothly. It was a relatively simple development project requiring the sports field that had been there for many years to have access road and car parking built. The actual mall complex was large but long rather than square or circular. The building comprised a set of large cells to house each of the businesses that would rent space there, twenty five in all. The German design was spacious, with a curving concourse between the hexagonal cells. Vertical steel beams held up the roof that covered the whole area. Pre-cast concrete panels made up the exterior walls. The concrete floor, the steel beams in the roof and the vertical studs provided a cage of metal to which the concrete panels were attached.
The floor was reinforced with high quality steel mesh from a New Zealand manufacturer. It was designed as a raft in time of flooding or earthquakes but as it sat on the bed of a primeval swamp it had to be pinned with piles going down to the bedrock some ten meters down.
Frank altered the design so he needed only one third the number of piles. Larcombe did not see the need for any piling because he was convinced the floor would maintain its integrity. The two men crossed swords over this issue with Frank insisting that he was the builder and the piles were essential. Frank saw a different side to Larcombe, who had quite a mean streak in him when decisions went against him.
The German architects modified the plan to suit New Zealand conditions and everything was approved quickly by the Council which stood to gain financially through fees and licences and indirectly through increased employment and trade. It was all up to Nigel the Chief Town Planner now.