Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

It can’t be all play and no work, so we decided it was time to try to find a temporary job to help fund our time here in New Zealand. We have Working Holiday Visas, so that allows us to get jobs if we want to while we’re in the country.

We both applied for a few different jobs, actually a ton of jobs, but most wanted a long commitment, which we weren’t interested in. I ended up getting a job with a staffing agency called Tradestaff, which basically just provides labor for companies that request it as needed. This certainly wasn’t anything glamorous, but $26/hr is $26/hr (~$15 US).

The first week Tradestaff got me with a crew building an inground pool. This job was doing manual labor prepping for the next concrete pour. This was a two day job and it was some tough manual labor, but the crew was nice and the weather was decent, so all things considered it was a solid first job. By the end of the second day, I was ready to not deal with concrete forms for a while. This job made me realize I don’t want to do concrete work for near minimum wage ever again. The ended on Thursday, so that gave us a long weekend, so we hit the road to do some exploring while we could.

The next week, Tradestaff lined up a job for me for Wednesday-Friday, we got the call Tuesday while we were roughly 3 hours away, so we hightailed it back to Queenstown for Wednesday morning. This job was helping a tech, Harrison, install elevators in residential houses. For these three days I was helping Harrison do a new install and some tweaks on a few already installed elevators on townhouses that were still being built. This was a fun job, Harrison was a nice guy and was happy to teach me about the elevators, which was cool to learn. This job was also nice because it was inside and out of the weather. Harrison started at 10:00am, so Taylor and I got to sleep in which made this job even better. This was easily my favorite job while in Queenstown.

The final job assignment I did in Queenstown was to help a company build a prefab house. This job started on Monday, so Taylor and I had a short weekend and we just stayed in Queenstown to check out the town some more. This job wasn’t too bad, it was basically just stacking Legos for this house that had all its pieces premade and labeled. I was helping two builders and there was usually another worker from Tradestaff. Towards the end there was another Trasdestaff guy from the UK, and he was pretty good.

These days were usually pretty slow, the two builders, Kharl and Greg, were in no rush to get things done. The house was probably 2500 square feet, single story, and the builders said they’d be at it for a total of 5-6 months. This seemed like twice as long as it should take, but everyone down here seems to work a bit slower. They relied solely on manual labor to install everything; windows, trusses, rafters, everything was put in by hand. I told them they should get a telehandler or a fork truck and it’d be faster, but they didn’t seem to agree. I guess that’s why they always have some tradestaff people helping them man handle things around. I stayed at this job for two weeks, towards the end of the second week the weather got pretty cold, below freezing at night and around 40F during the day. At this point, Taylor and I were both getting tired of living in a van, in the cold, so it was a good time to call it quits.

All in all we made just under $3,000 NZ, which will help fund the next couple months of our travels. We also got a good long stay at Queenstown, a town that we both liked, but by the end of it we were excited to hit the road again.