YEEHAA!

I've just received an email from the council, saying our building consent has been granted! I'm off to the council offices tomorrow morning, to collect the consent document and pay another $1,500 (the second half of the consent fees). 

From now on things should start to hot up. Watch this space!

Helen

First things first

Well, we're still waiting for a building permit before we can start putting the track in and getting on with real work. In the meantime however, we did manage to stick up a gate. Doesn't sound too tricky, but the gateposts seemed to be made out of wood from the rare New Zealand Concrete Tree - so there was a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth. We had to have a picnic and a big sit down afterwards.

We did mark the house out with some string, but sadly you can't see it in any of the photos. (Probably because it was so small!) We've now run out of things to do other than wait for the council. Fingers crossed they get back to us this week.

Be afraid - Helen with power tools!

Me in a battle of wits with a post - It was a close thing!

The finished article. The sheep won't be too happy.

Limbo

No, I'm not talking about the party dance popular in the '70s involving a stick and the risk of a slipped disk. Over the last couple of weeks we've felt at a loose end, wanting desperately to start building our house, but having to wait for building consent. I rang the council on Monday to find out how things were progressing, and they sent me a copy of the list of queries they had just sent to our architect. I panicked when I saw there were about a dozen issues needing attention, but apparently this is pretty normal. It's not unusual to have up to thirty queries. None of the queries were major, either, which is a huge relief. There was nothing relating to the position of the proposed building site, which is great news; Iain and I were worried that we might not be allowed to build on the hill, which is by far the best spot for a house. So the upshot is that we should be good to go, but we'll just have to wait a few more weeks before we can start.

There's another reason why I'm feeling a bit lost at the moment. After an intense couple of weeks of working ten-hour days to meet a tight deadline, my hands and wrists are painful from too much typing, and I have a lump on my left wrist that is restricting movement in the joint. Fortunately, my workload next week is very light, so I should be able to get the rest I need, but typing like I am now is very slow and terribly frustrating. (I'm typing with two pens, each one acting like a forefinger.) Consequently this post isn't going to be very long!

My wrist injury is affecting my yoga practice, too, with a fair number of poses being impossible right now. It's another source of frustration, but a good opportunity to try practising acceptance (one of life's lessons I really struggle with!)

Somebody once famously (and extremely annoyingly) said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so to save me too much frustrating typing, here are a few photos from the last couple of weeks.

Me and our kowhai trees which we planted from seed a year ago

Here's a reminder of what they looked like 6 months ago.

A particularly eerie rainbow over the roof of our little rental

Book Club meeting at our section (l. to r. me, Sally, Rena, Diane and Annette)

That's going to be our view, that is! (l. to r. Annette, Melissa, Sally and Rena)

Well, this has taken me almost an hour to put together, so I'm going to sign off now. I'll try to cajole Iain into making the next post.

Helen