A visit to the big smoke

Last weekend we took advantage of a spell of unexpectedly sunny weather to take ourselves out for an airing. It was a bit too chilly for a stroll along the beach, so, seeing as Iain had a pile of old computer games he fancied trading in for a couple of new ones, we set off to the nearest big city, Palmerston North, for a rare shopping expedition. Palmerston North was given the second part of its name by New Zealand Post in 1871, to distinguish it from another town called Palmerston, which is on the South Island. Around here people simply refer to it as 'Palmy'. Iain and I like to call it 'the big smoke'.

The town park, where ducks rule

More ducks in action

When we say 'big' it's with our tongues firmly in our cheeks. It's the biggest settlement between here and the capital city, Wellington (which is a three hour drive away), but its population is only about 79 thousand. I wanted to look up a list of English towns and cities by population, so that I could find a town to compare it to, population-wise, but the only list I could find didn't have anywhere with a population of less than 100,000. So, it's probably safe to say it's not very big at all by UK standards.

Roses in June (the equivalent of December for all you 'topsiders')

Palmerston is a monumentally unattractive town, in stark contrast to Wanganui, and it has its own rather unfortunate microclimate that means it sees far fewer sunshine hours than here, gets a lot more rain, and is several degrees cooler, especially in the winter. When John Cleese toured New Zealand a couple of years ago, he referred to Palmy as the "...suicide capital of New Zealand. If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick." According to Wikipedia, one of the municipal rubbish tips now has an official-looking sign naming it "Mt Cleese".

The city council offices

While we were out and about I took a few snaps with the little camera I always keep in my handbag, and hopefully these show some of the more photogenic sights that you can catch in Palmerston, if you know where to look.

The wild west saloon look, typical of old pubs and hotels

That's all for now; it's late and my brain is flagging. I hope to be able to post an update on the house build before the week is out.

Helen

Apt and witty title suggestions welcome

A bit of an update on the house-building front.

Last week I went to meet Phil at the section, so he could get a better feel for the site and its outlook. He gave me printouts of the CAD drawings of his initial concept plan. These include a more detailed floor plan, all four elevations and two perspective views, one of the front of the house and the other of the western outlook. We can't post these here, unfortunately, because they're on A3 paper, which means they're too big to fit onto our scanner.

Iain and I studied the CAD plans and there are just a few minor tweaks we've asked Phil to make; mainly concerning the size and positioning of windows. Next step is for Phil to come up with a developed concept plan. This needs to be detailed enough for builders and other trades people to be able to draw up quotes for products and services. I expect this planning stage will take the longest to complete, as there will be so many details to consider, so lots of to-ing and fro-ing with the specifications. At the end of the process we aim to get something that fits the budget constraints, suits the smallholding lifestyle and excites us. Not a very tall order, really! ;-)

Phil says he's been inspired in his design by the architecture of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an ex-pat Austrian who lived in New Zealand for the last twenty-five years of his life. Before I came to New Zealand I only knew Hundertwasser for his paintings, but he's probably better know for his architecture. His public toilets at Kawakawa, in Northland (the northern part of the North Island) are a well-known landmark here and are on the tourist trail.

Hundertwasser's public toilets in Kawakawa, NZ...

...the entrance

...interior view

Hundertwasser was famous for his dislike of straight lines and right angles, preferring everything to be wonky and curved. Looking at Phil's design for our cabin, it's difficult to see where the Hundertwasser influence comes in, because all the lines are straight, with no curves at all. I expect Phil's used straight lines for the reason most architects do; straight shapes are much cheaper to build.

One area in which we might be able to make the house more Hundertwasser-like is in the exterior colour scheme. Phil's proposing cladding the house in plywood panels, which can then be painted or stained in a variety of colours. Maybe he was thinking of this building in Vienna:

The 'Hundertwasser House' in Vienna

To get even more of a Hundertwasser vibe, it might also be fun to use coloured bottles and mosaic tiling in both the interior and exterior detailing. I've done mosaic work before, and I'd be keen to incorporate it into the new house. I especially like the idea of a mosaic on the wall of the outside room.

Anyway, I've got to go now; I've got a busy day today and my allotted 'posting time' is now over.

Helen

Autumn up the river

This week's post is going to be light on words and heavy on images.

We had a very special book club meeting this week. We went out to Annette's place, which is about 45 kilometres out of town up the river road, and stayed overnight. Iain and I have stayed there before, as paying guests, when we took Jane and Pete up the river, and we had a wonderful time. See our write-up here. It was great to be going back again so soon. Here are some photos.

Tree ferns in the early morning light - can you spot the Moon?

Annette and John's house, as autumn turns to winter

On the deck

One view from Annette and John's deck...

...and another

...and another

...and another!

Inside the cottage where we stayed

Loading up the eponymous Flying Fox, the cable car across the river

View back to the house from the cable car

Me on the cable car

Gaye on the cable car

Carvings at the cable car station

Helen

Baby steps

Yesterday we took a couple of baby steps on the house-building journey.

The vendor's solicitor rang yesterday morning to say the surveyor is finally going to do the survey. He reckons it will take around four or five weeks for the legalisation process to be completed, at which stage it will be back in the hands of the council. With a bit of luck, we should finally have title to the land in about 3 months' time -- thirteen months after we signed the contract!

We got another pleasant surprise in the afternoon. We hadn't expected to receive the initial concept sketches from the architect, Phil, for another month or so, so we were delighted when they turned up in my e-mail inbox. Phil explained that some ideas won't let go of you until you put them down on paper, and this had been one of them (I know exactly what he means -- sometimes poems and stories do the same to me!)

Iain and I spent a few hours last night poring over the design and talking it through, and we really like it -- Phil's met our criteria really well, and we've got a renewed sense of enthusiasm about the whole project. It's going to take a lot of time and effort, because we'll be managing the whole project ourselves, and doing the majority of the internal fit-out too, but we're confident we're going to end up with a home we'll love.

Anyway, I'm going to sign off now. I've got a raging sore throat and my brain is fried. I just wanted to share the good news and show off the preliminary sketches.

I've got a site visit with Phil next Wednesday, so I'll give you an update after that.

Helen


Click on the pics to get a bigger view.

Initial concept: Elevation

Initial concept: Floorplan

Land stuff

H phoned up the district planner today to find out what the hold up is. For a council department they were refreshingly open and forthcoming. No big issues by all accounts, just the need for the vendor's surveyor to do his job and submit the survey, then it's all done. It'll take 2 months from then to process.

The surveyor is, however, a muppet. So to anyone in the area who wants to employ a surveyor, I'd recommend avoiding John Harrison of Harrison & O'Sullivan unless you like waiting 12 months to get a field surveyed. Our surveyor did a really detailed geotech report in less than a month, so how a basic land survey can take this long beggars belief.

Decisions, decisions, Part 2

Apologies for not posting part 2 sooner, but another contract came along (thankfully a nice short one this time!) When I'm chasing a deadline and spending long hours at the computer every day I try to avoid spending any of my spare time at the keyboard.

Anyway, trying my best to pick up where I left off last time...

After making the decision to get a house designed with an architect, one fell into our lap, figuratively speaking. Iain was talking about our plans with a work colleague and it turns out she knows an architectural designer who works in Palmerston North, the 'big smoke' about an hour's drive from Wanganui. She gave us his contact details and we looked up the website of the firm he works for. We felt a bit intimidated when we saw the buildings in their online portfolio, but we dropped him an email nonetheless, asking if he'd be interested in designing a 'hippy cabin'. Thankfully, he said it sounded like fun, and would we like to arrange a meeting to discuss our ideas?

So that we'd have something to discuss at our meeting, and to give the architect, (whose name is Phil, by the way), a better idea of the sort of thing we were after, we sifted through the hundreds of house-related images we've collected from the internet over the last year or so, ever since we decided to build a new home. Initially we narrowed it down to about a dozen that we both liked, but I thought we might actually muddy the issue if we gave Phil too many images. I thought a single, well-chosen image would communicate our vision much more effectively.

Here's the image we gave him:

An interior we both really like

There are so many things that appeal to us about this interior: the 'solid' feel (even though it looks as if it the walls might be straw bale), the rough plaster finish on the walls, the rough wood cladding, the wooden post and beams, the wooden doors and windows, (yes, we're suckers for wood!) and the way it manages to feel both light and airy and cosy at the same time. It's neither strikingly modern, nor overtly traditional, but a clever and unpretentious blend of the two.

Once our 'key image' was chosen we needed to communicate the nitty-gritty of what we want from the house, and we decided to draw a mind map for this. When we first started we thought the complementary areas of form and function would be pretty evenly balanced, but as the mind map evolved, we discovered that for us, the functional considerations far outweigh the aesthetic side of things. This came as a bit of a revelation, or at least it did for me. I've always been an out-and-out dreamer, and I never realised before how important practicalities are to me. Maybe it's a function of middle age? (All observations welcome.)

Click here to view our new home mindmap. (Be patient; it's a big file!)

We had our initial meeting with Phil last week, and explained our ideas. We also gave him some photos of the section, as well as a map the engineer drew when he did the geotech report. He said it was an ideal spot to build a house, which was gratifying, because it confirmed what we've thought all along - that we've got a real cracker of a site, which we should be able to make into something really special.

Phil's busy on a big project right now, but he should be free in about six weeks time, and then it should only take him a couple of weeks to draw up a concept plan. Fortunately Phil seemed to think it would be possible to build the sort of thing we're looking for within our budget, and he even talked about the possibility of building a mezzanine, which is something we'd always fancied, but always assumed would bump the price up too much.

On the land purchase front there's still no more news on when the subdivision is likely to go through; we won't be at all surprised if the first anniversary of signing the contract comes around and we still haven't got the land.

Anyway, it's getting late, so I'll sign off now and catch you again next week.

Helen

Decisions, decisions Part 1

Ever since we signed the contract on our section out at Turakina almost ten months ago we've been talking about what to do with the land, and the main topic of our discussions has been what type of house to build. 

Thanks to Iain's tireless research efforts, we've looked into many possibilities. They are, in no particular order:

1. Relocating an old house and renovating it on site. 'House Movers' has a whole different meaning here in New Zealand, where houses are stick-built and can be picked up and put on the back of a lorry, even if it does mean cutting them in half first.
   
2. a Lockwood Home (the 'posh dream home' option).
   
3. an almost-dream-home with one of the other national house building franchises who have branches nearby
   
4. a standard home design with a local builder
   
5. a non-standard home designed by an architect
   
6. a lined and insulated garage
   
7. a tipi
   
8. a yurt
   
9. a caravan
   
10. a house truck
    
11. a geodesic dome
    
12. an earthship
    
13. a prefabricated wood cabin
14. a prefabricated 1880s style cottage
15. a kitset home (you buy the materials in kit form and either build it yourself or get a local builder to put it up for you.)
    
16. a bach (cheap holiday home)
    

We were anxious not to overlook any of the options open to us, but after a while it became necessary to throw out some of the ideas, just to keep our heads from exploding.

Decision number 1: Build a permanent home. We made this decision because we want to live in a particular spot on our section. If we were to build a temporary structure, someone on an adjacent section could build their house too close, and we'd lose our ideal, private building site. The tipi, yurt, caravan and house truck had to go. 

Decision number 2: Borrow as little money as possible. Both of us earn only modest amounts of money, but in discussions with the bank we found they were willing to give us a quite immodest loan, which would translate into mortgage repayments that would soak up a truly scary proportion of our disposable income. Tempting as it might be to borrow the full amount the bank is offering, if we did so we'd never be able to afford to develop the land, to go on holiday, or to do any of the other things we enjoy doing, and we'd be suffering extreme anxiety every time interest rakes took a hike. What's more, we'd never stand a chance of paying our mortgage off before we reached 65. Iain also did some rather sobering calculations on the long-term cost of borrowing, and found that the overall cost of borrowing doesn't rise proportionately with the size of the loan, but exponentially. Out went the dream home and the nearly-dream-home.

Decision number 3: Go for practicality. Practicality is always an important consideration for us in most areas of life, so I'm surprised we didn't reach this decision sooner. 

Impracticality comes in many forms, and we decided to get rid of the renovating an old house option because of the potential for significant overspend. It's difficult to estimate costs accurately until you start dismantling things, and discover the whole roof/framing/floor needs to be replaced because of rust/wetrot/woodworm/*insert other problem here*. 

We binned the geodesic dome and the earthship on the same 'impracticality' pretext. It would cost a lot to get either of them built, because they use specialised building techniques, and we weren't prepared to take on the huge task of building them ourselves. 

Decision number 4: Go for something that inspires you. At a stroke this decision got rid of options 4, 6 and 16. We just didn't feel excited about the prospect of building a cheap, off-the-peg kiwi house, a garage or a bach. 

That left us with just four options, (numbers 5, 13, 14 & 15) which was a much more manageable number to choose from. We weighed all these four options up again, and decided that the one that enthused us the most was to get a non-standard home, designed by an architect. 

Iain found out that, on average, it costs about 20% more to build an architect-designed house rather than an off-the-peg one, but there are several ways that we're planning  on clawing back the extra expense: First of all, we're willing to sacrifice size (there are only two of us, after all - we don't need the 'standard' 150 to 200 square meter home - we reckon between 80 and 100 square meters is plenty big enough. We're also happy to use building materials that are chosen for their practicality rather than their aesthetics, i.e. rough board and batten cladding instead of the more expensive weatherboard. Finally, we're willing to pitch in and do the interior work ourselves. We've looked into what's involved in an internal fit-out, and while it will be very time-consuming, we're confident that we've already got most of the skills involved, and those we don't have, we're capable of learning.

Well, this post has gone on for a lot longer than I expected and I've run out of time, so I'm going to have to make it a two-parter, with part two next weekend.

Helen

Quiz team celebrates in style

This is just a very quick post to upload some photos I was given (thanks, Frank.) I'll write a proper blog entry at the weekend.

Some of you may remember a post from December 2006 with photos of our pub quiz team's Christmas bash. Well, I'm pleased to report that the team's still going strong, although we've moved to a different pub, where the quiz is livelier, the food is better, and the prize vouchers are not only more generous, but they're also valid for twelve months rather than for three nights of the following week.

We've been doing pretty well in the quiz, often coming second and sometimes even making first place, and as soon as we collect enough vouchers, we spend them on a celebratory meal. Here are some photos of our latest 'team meal' last weekend.

'Bill's Clues'. On the right (l to r): Scott, me, Frank and Linda

On the left, (l to r): Jane, Andrew (AKA Maccas), Iain and Bruce (AKA Lippy)

Bruce before drinking the Sambuca...

...and after

Helen

Jane and Pete's visit - Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of Jane and Pete's Visit. This time I'm going to let the photos do the talking, and keep the words to a minimum. Partly, this is because I don't want to bore anyone with my rambling narrative, but mainly it's because the things I'm writing about happened about six weeks ago, and they're beginning to fade from memory. While I have an amazing recall of useless facts and figures, I've always had a very poor memory for events, and the older I get, the woollier it becomes.

After returning home from our trip up the Whanganui River we hopped aboard Jane and Pete's mobile home, and set off for a bit of a tour. First we went to Waitomo Glowworm Caves, near Hamilton. Flash photography isn't permitted, because it disturbs the glowworms, so the only shot I got was of the river as we emerged into daylight at the end of our trip.

The Waitomo River, outside Waitomo Glowworm Caves

There's an interesting short video about Waitomo Glowworm Caves here.

After Waitomo we made our way to Rotorua, which many kiwis call Rotovegas, because it's the tourism capital of the North Island. The two main attractions we checked out while we were in Rotorua were Wai-o-Tapu Thermal Wonderland, and Tamaki Māori Village.

Wai-o-Tapu Thermal Wonderland

The Devil's Bathtub - he must use Radox

Bubbling mud pools

Thermal Park Panorama - The Artist's Palette and The Champagne Pool

The Lady Knox Geyser

Jane and Pete in the foreground, some geyser in the background!

Iain and I

For more information about Wai-o-Tapu Termal Wonderland, visit their website.

Tamaki Māori Village, Rotorua

The cultural evening at Tamaki Māori village was excellent. We didn't manage to get any decent photographs, though, because we were at the back of the group, and most of the events were held outside, in the dark. As a result, I have several dozen beautifully illuminated photos of someone's bald head, and not much else. To see some good photos, and to find out more about Tamaki village, visit the Tamaki Māori Village website.

On our way back to Wanganui from Rotorua we stopped off at Huka Falls near Taupo. Huka Falls is the largest waterfall on the Waikato River, and although the water level was much lower than normal, after several months of drought conditions, they were still spectacular. I fancied a ride on the jetboat, but had to make do with watching it from above. That's an experience to write on my 'to do' list.

Huka Falls, near Taupo

The Huka Falls Jet Boat - looks like fun!

Helen

Jane and Pete's visit - Part 1

For the last three and a half months I've been spending 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week sitting at the computer, writing. Not surprisingly, I've not felt like spending any of my spare time sitting at the computer, writing, so I've not made any blog posts. Now the mammoth project is finished, I have no more excuses.

At the end of February Iain and I took a week off work to spend with Iain's sister Jane and her partner Pete, who were visiting from the U.K. It was great to see them again after three years, and it was exciting for us to be able to show them around our adopted country. Before they arrived in Wanganui they spent a couple of weeks touring round the northern half of the North Island in a camper van.

Iain and I on the jetboat up the Whanganui River

The Flying Fox: view from the deck of Annette and John's house

When Jane and Pete arrived in Wanganui we took them up the Whanganui River by jetboat and stayed at The Flying Fox, which is owned by Annette, a friend of mine from book club. It's difficult to describe The Flying Fox, because there's nothing else to compare it to; it really is unique. It's situated miles from anywhere on the banks of the river, surrounded by native bush. Annette and her partner John have built two guest cottages and a little wagon they call The Glory Cart, or you can camp out in the clearing, under the stars. You can self cater, or do as we did and take advantage of Annette's fantastic cooking. Almost everything is grown on site, in their organic gardens. There's no road access, so the only way to get there is by boat, or via the flying fox across the river, from which the place takes its name. As soon as you step off the boat the place starts to work its magic on you. You can feel your breathing slow and deepen and your blood pressure drop.

The cottage where we stayed

We stayed in one of the cottages, named after the local poet, James K. Baxter, and had our first encounter with a composting toilet. We're thinking of installing one when we build our house, so it was good to be able to try one out. It was a bit whiffy, but Annette explained that this was because the fan had been off for most of the day, because there had been a power cut. When the fan's working there's hardly any smell, apparently.

We spent a very pleasant evening eating, talking, laughing, listening to the cottage's eclectic record collection and (with the exception of yours truly) drinking wine. Iain and I had the upstairs bedroom, and we left the curtains open all night so we could look out at the forest and the stars. The mosquito net above the bed wasn't just for decoration -- we were very glad we had it. At dawn I sneaked outside and practised yoga in the clearing outside the cottage, to the sounds of the river and the awakening birds. It was, as the kiwis are so fond of saying, awesome.

Morning light

After a delicious breakfast courtesy of Annette and some basic canoe instruction from John, we canoed back down the river. Iain and I have been in a canoe together before, and it was not a happy experience*, so it was great to be able to swap partners this time. I sailed with Pete, and once I'd got the hang of steering, everything went smoothly and we had a relaxing paddle, with just a couple of hairy moments, when we hit a log side-on and when we found ourselves going backwards down a rapid. Iain and Jane had a more torrid trip, but miraculously managed to avoid running aground or capsizing.

We made it! At journey's end

Well, that about does it for part 1. I'll post up part 2 in a week's time.

Helen

*the biggest understatement of the millennium

It's been a while

H was supposed to be taking over blogging duties for a bit, but seems to have run out of things to say. (That's a first!) In her defense, she's been rather snowed under with work. That's all done now, so hopefully she'll put a couple of posts up concerning our recent activities. Watch this space!

Don't fall off your chair...

...but it's Helen making this post. Over the last six months or so Iain has taken over blogging duties almost entirely - a distinct role reversal, compared to the early days when we first started the blog. From now on I'm going to make an effort to pull my weight a bit more. 

In the last few weeks we've been settling into our rental, and Iain's been settling back into the routine at work. He loves the fact that work is now only a three-minute drive away, compared to the hefty seven-minute commute he was doing before. ;-) 

Our little rental - 'granny' but good

I'm pleased to report that Pookie has settled in well, too. We bought a pheromone diffuser which our cattery guy recommended. It's like a plug-in air freshener, but instead of perfume it diffuses a synthetic version of the cat facial pheromone (the stuff cats are spreading around when they rub their face up against the furniture). I think the cat pheromones must be working their magic on me, too. I was feeling very stressed before the move, but now I feel unusually chilled out, despite working long hours.

My workload is absolutely manic right now.  Since just before Christmas I've been working seven days a week on a project for Pearson Education in Australia. It's a series of 21 home practice workbooks in English, and the deadline for completing the first draft of the manuscripts is the middle of March. 

I won't be working for quite the whole time, though - Iain and I are taking ten days off work at the end of February to spend with Jane and Pete while they're on their 7-week tour of New Zealand.  The weather here has been hot and dry for weeks and weeks *, so we're hoping it won't start bucketing it down as soon as Jane and Pete arrive. They touch down in Godzone this coming Saturday, but we have to wait for another three weeks before they make their way down to Wanganui. We're both very much looking forward to seeing them. 

An interesting feature of the front garden!

The house building process is progressing as fast as can be expected before taking possession of the land. We've seen a draft house plan from one of the building companies we've been talking to, and the plan from the second lot should be ready by the end of this week. It's going to be very difficult making the final decision about who to build with, but it's so exciting to be in this position in the first place that we're not complaining! Building our own home on 8 1/2 acres of land is not something we could ever have contemplated back in the UK.  Once we've made the final decision about who our builder is going to be, we'll post up the initial plans to give you an idea of what the house is going to look like. 

Helen

*Phil and Sally - honestly, it has!

All done

We're now installed in our new place. Thank gawd for that! I'm back at work too, which is good - I've got a gentle couple of weeks before the new students start, so it all feels very relaxed. The weather is stunning at the moment - it's perhaps a bit too toasty for my tastes, and we could do with a spot of rain before the garden turns completely to dust.

We've just been to see another builder (number 3) to get another concept done, sounded pretty promising although we're no further forward as to the land title being issued - I'll be suprised if we see any progress there before April TBH. The vendor has done most of the stuff he was supposed to, it'll be down to the local council to do their bit now. (groan)

I'll grab some piccies of our new place at the weekend (including one of the concrete stag on the front lawn.... seriously! Gnomes just don't cut it out in the colonies, don't cha know.)

Moving sucks

We started moving stuff across to our rental yesterday. We're shifting all the small fiddly stuff bit by bit over two days, then shifting the furniture and ourselves on Wednesday. Fortunately the new place is only about 5 minutes drive from our current house, which makes life easier.

I'm totally over the whole moving thing. This will be our 6th move in less than 3 years, and we have one more to do later on this year (hopefully). I don't want to move again for a very long time!!

Season's Greetings

I hope you all had a jolly Christmas and Santa brought everything you wanted. We spent Christmas morning having a champagne breakfast with my boss and her family, which was very pleasant and tonight we're off out to friends for a meal. Other than that, we've been taking it easy - although Helen is having to work on a new contract, which sucks a bit.

We've got a rental place sorted for the 11th January. It's a small 2 bed unit in town. It's tidy, but small and very sixties. The landlady is a friend of our estate agent and lives next door. (Always handy having the landlord on hand!), it's not great but it'll tide us over until the house is finished.

On the house front, we've had meetings with 2 building companies so far, who've both gone away to produce concept plans and quotes and we've got a third builder to talk to in the new year. The title to the land isn't sorted yet, and realistically it'll be late Jan or Feb before we expect any news on that. By the time it comes through, I'm hoping we'll have chosen the builder and got the final plans ready for building consent approval.

Being a rural build, things won't be as straightforward as a normal town build. The section has power & phone to the boundary and that's pretty much it. We've got to take the power line from the boundary to the build site (which is 200m +), build an access road of 350m (some of which is steep incline), put in water storage tanks (the house is going to have a roof collection & purification system) and a waste treatment system (can't get away with a simple septic system, it has to be a fancy thing according to the local authority). We're also going for solar water heating - we did think about going completely off-grid, but unless we win Lotto, that's not happening.

By the time we've done all that lot, we'll be skint and living in a shed. However, it'll be a very nice shed, with an amazing toilet and lots of pure hot water!

One unfortunate effect of moving to a tiddly rental (and subsequently moving to our eco-shed) will be the loss of my "man cave".

I'm deeply upset.

Here's a couple of photos of the current (somewhat untidy) version:





On a positive note, I'm trying to wangle a major upgrade to the sound system into the budget, so not only will our 6x4 foot shed have hot pure water and a deluxe bog, it will also have a kick ass home theatre with a high end surround sound system.
It'll probably get axed in favour of having posher door handles and double glazing, but I can always dream.....

Sold!

We finally went unconditional on our house yesterday. Thank goodness for that! It's been a bit stressful because we can't start to do anything to the land until after we've sold - and it would appear that property markets everywhere, including NZ, have taken a serious turn for the worse. We move out on January 11th, so the next step is to get a rental and wait for the land subdivision to be approved by council. Hopefully that will all happen by Jan/Feb next year at which point we can then begin the whole planning & building process.

In other news, our gorgeous little kitty - Smudge - was run over on Friday. We were absolutely gutted. We both thought she was the best pet we've ever had. Such a lovely, bouncy and affectionate thing.

Cracking weather, Grommit

We've had a glorious few weeks weather-wise across the whole of NZ. Blue skies, heaps of sunshine and toasty temperatures. We've been doing a fair bit of sneaking off to the beach and chilling out in garden - but we're also working on grabbing a few piccies for a video blog. Last year was a bit naff weather wise, while you lot in the UK had a scorcher, it was pretty mediocre here - summer was very late in coming. No such problems this year!

A change in direction?

I'm currently mulling over a change in the blog (while sitting on the porch, soaking up the sun - I'm off work with a lergie, so mulling is all I feel like doing at the moment!). Keeping momentum on a blog is pretty difficult, our entries have tailed off to one or two a month and I suspect people don't visit as much without the regular updates.

A change is as good as a rest, so one way of getting a bit of enthusiasm back would be to switch to doing a monthly video diary or podcast, backed up with a photo gallery and website. We'd set it up so that you could subscribe via a newsfeed or iTunes and have a set date each month when we published. Whaddya think?

A new video

Finally, after a lot of faffing about, I've uploaded a video of our new section at Turakina. It's a bit hefty at 152mb and so it's probably best to download it before watching. Not of interest to the casual viewer - just those interested in seeing a drive along a kiwi road and a tour of a muddy field.

The link is http://gallery.mac.com/technohippies#100070

A quick update

We finally went unconditional on the land today - the geotech surveyor gave everything the thumbs up. The only thing we need to do is plant some erosion control trees on the slope above the access road, when we put the road in. It'll cost us $3-4k extra, but nothing show stopping. The house site itself (i.e. the hill) is basically on solid rock, so isn't going anywhere in a hurry. Always good to know!

Other NZ news of note is Ruapehu erupted last week. Completely without warning, it just went bang and shot a load of boulders, lava, ash & mud out of the top. Not so great for the people in the climbers hut near the summit, or the skiers enjoying a holiday break!



More info and cool pics here