Going to the dogs

No, that's not a river -- the lower part of our track is flooded.

Iain took Friday off work, and today was a bank holiday, so we had a four-day weekend to work on the house. Winter has arrived in earnest now, and it’s been a struggle to motivate ourselves in the mornings, but once we’ve arrived on site, we’ve been too busy to pay much attention to the cold.

Me (AKA Antifreeze Woman) not noticing the cold

Our first job was to straighten up all four corners of the frame so that they were vertically plumb. We reckoned this would take us about half a day, but it ended up taking us all of Friday and Saturday. This was because we had to partially rebuild one of the end walls, which was seriously wonky. It wasn’t right when it was delivered, but dropping it when we were trying to put it up the other week probably didn’t help to straighten it!

Our next job was to attach the wire dogs: enormous hammer-in staples, which will prevent the roof lifting off the frame in high winds. The wire dogs go on all the exterior walls, joining every stud to the top plate, both inside and out. They need to be flush, and our friendly builder, Denis, said we should ‘just bruise them in’. Evidently neither of us is much of a bruiser, because we couldn’t get them anything like flush using the brute force approach, so we had to cut out channels. For all 170 of them. Iain used a router for the studs in the middle of the walls, and where the router wouldn’t fit (in the corners and at junctions with internal walls) I cut out the channels by hand with a chisel. It took us all of Sunday and Monday. From now on, we’ll be using ‘wire dog’ as an expletive.

Iain, a ladder, a router and lots of wire dogs

And finally, something not related to the house build. In typical laid-back Kiwi fashion, the photographer who took photos of the citizenship ceremony took almost three weeks to post the proofs up on his website. Here, at last, is the promised snap. We reckon it’s not a bad one of the two of us, although my hair looks inexplicably ginger. Either the photographer didn’t have the white balance adjusted correctly for the lighting conditions, or else he was using a special gingerfication filter. I prefer the second explanation.

We don't scrub up too badly, do we?

The hare and the tortoise

The Hare

On Saturday, en route to the building site, we went down to the river to take a look at the boat Earthrace, which was moored in Wanganui for a few days during a promotional tour around New Zealand.

Earthrace moored on the Whanganui river

If you're not familiar with Earthrace, she's a 24 metre long tri-hull 'wavepiercer', which means that instead of riding over the top of the waves like an ordinary boat, she cuts right through them, dipping up to 7 metres below the surface. The Earth bit of her name is a nod to the fuel she runs on: 100% biodiesel. The race bit refers to the fact that she was designed to break the record for circumnavigating the globe. She did just that last year, setting a new world record, when she crossed the finishing line just a few minutes short of the 61 day mark.

The back end of Earthrace (note my careful use of the correct sailing term)

Bizarre Fact

The skipper of Earthrace, Pete Bethune, underwent liposuction, and the fat was used to make a small amount of biodiesel for the boat.

Iain was blown away by the boat's radical design (but, I noticed, not sufficiently impressed to pay 5 dollars to get on board and have a look inside.) I was more lukewarm in my appreciation. I'm not a big fan of boats, mainly because of the whole seasickness thing. I was also disappointed to see that the outside of the boat had been vandalised by taggers (probably while it had been moored in Auckland), so it was looking a bit tatty. Finally, I've got reservations about the boat's ecological credentials, because I'm not convinced by the 'biodiesel is green' argument. Sure, biodiesel is carbon neutral, so it's much better than ordinary diesel, but it's a long way from being pollution-free. If you were really serious about minimising your environmental impact, you'd be in a saiboat.

The Tortoise

Iain and I spent the weekend on our building site (the plan for every weekend for the forseeable future). The weather was cold, windy and wet, but we gritted our teeth, wrapped up in seven layers of clothing each, and got stuck in. Our job this weekend was to secure the frame to the slab, which doesn't sound like much, but it took us the whole weekend to do it!

Iain hammers in a bolt

The base plate of the frame is attached to the slab by 14 cm long bolts - sixy-five of them in all. To attach the bolts you have to drill through 4.5 cm of wood and 9.5 cm of reinforced concrete. We had to hire a special hammer-action drill to do this. We also had to repair the frame in one place where it had split, and we had to take apart a piece of framing and alter it when we found that one of the drainpipes coincided with a stud.

On Saturday afternoon we had a flying visit from our friend Diane. She took this photo of us. As you can see, conditions were pretty grim!

Hammers: blokes' version (left) and girls' version (right)

Next weekend we've got a load more hardware to put into the frame (straps on all the lintels and window studs, and about 200 wire dogs to attach each stud to the top plate). We've also got to plumb the walls vertically and get the top plates square horizontally. We're going to be spending a lot of time going up and down ladders!

The first week on site

I took a week off work in order to make a start. The weather didn't do us any favours and it took us a while to get into our stride, but we're making progress! Next weekend we hope to get the frame trued up and properly bolted down.

Everything arrives

Where do we start?...

...With a cup of tea!

"Which way round does this go again?"

Only another 100 slots to chisel...

Making progress

Citizenship ceremony article

Click on the link below to read the article about the citizenship ceremony, which contains our interview.

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/5295/citizenshiparticle.jpg

P.S. More build photos coming this weekend!

The finished slab

This morning we drove out to the building site to take our first look at the completed slab, and to see how the driveway has held up under the more or less incessant rain we've had over the past week.

Part of the lower section of the drive is flooded, but the slope is reasonably dry, and there haven't been any major landslips where the hill has been cut away, so hopefully the lorry that delivers the framing timber on Monday will be able to get up the hill.

We took a couple of photos of the slab. The first one gives you a pretty good idea of how big our house is going to be (or how small, if you happen to live in anything bigger than a caravan). It also makes Iain laugh like a drain, because it caught me off-guard in a moment of excessive Gumby-ness.

A quick reminder: Monty Python's Gumby family

Spot the family resemblance?

The second photo gives a close-up view of some of the pipes and wiring. Iain's standing just outside where the kitchen window will be, and I'm stood just outside the bathroom. The grey pipes in the foreground are the toilet cistern inlet pipe on the left and the toilet waste pipe (the big one!) The short green pipe with the coil of cable coming out of it is the telephone cabling. We have no idea why it's coming up next to the toilet, but no doubt it will be handy if Iain ever gets a hankering for pizza while he's sitting on the bog! The thick black cable is the electricity.

Tomorrow we're meeting a builder on site, who is going to give us some tips for putting up the framing, and then on Monday the frame and trusses are being delivered, and we'll be starting work. Watch this space!

We're kiwis!

Iain and I have just got back from the District Council offices, after being sworn in as New Zealand citizens. There were about forty or so other people being granted citizenship at the ceremony, from eleven different countries.

Standing up and making the affirmation was done on an individual basis, and I was pretty nervous. It doesn't help your nerves when your surname's at the end of the alphabet, and you have to go last! Making the affirmation feels similar to making your wedding vows, but rather than making a commitment to a person, you're making a commitment to a country.

While we were waiting for the ceremony to start, Iain and I were interviewed by a reporter from the local paper, and the article should appear in print on Thursday. I'll scan it in and post it up when we get a copy.

We took our little snappy camera with us, but we didn't bother taking any photos, because there was a professional photographer there. We'll post up some pics when we get them.

Pouring the slab

Four years and four lists of four things

On Sunday it will be four years to the day since we arrived in New Zealand. To mark our four-year anniversary, here are four lists of four things Iain and I have put together.


The 4 best things about New Zealand

New Zealanders. The people here are laid-back, open and friendly. They're enthuiastic and self-reliant but at the same time pretty liberal-minded and accepting. Generally, people have a more positive attitude to life, which they call 'Kiwi can do'.

The weather. There's a hell of a lot more sunshine hours per year here than in the UK. Even in the depths of winter, we rarely go for more than a day or two without a blue sky day. It really lifts the spirits, and makes winter a breeze to get through. It also helps that winter only lasts for two months, instead of six! Summers here are long, but not too hot, which suits us just fine.

Space. No, not the final frontier, but the room to swing a very large cat! With a landmass 20% bigger than the UK and a population about 1/15th the size, crowds just aren't a problem. There's no overcrowding, so everything feels that much calmer and less manic.

Milford Sound

The Landscape. We're sure you don't need us to tell you that New Zealand has some of the best landscapes in the world. Alpine mountains, lush rainforests, crystal clear lakes, volcanoes, stunning beaches and wide open plains. We've got all these and more besides. On a more personal note, we reckon the view from our soon-to-be-built cabin is going to be pretty spectacular too.

The 4 worst things about New Zealand

A typical Kiwi house

Kiwi houses. We read somewhere that New Zealand has the worst housing stock of any country in the OECD, and we can believe it. Almost without exception, the houses here are cold, damp, and look as though they were last decorated in the 1950s. Double glazing and central heating are only just starting to arrive here, and insulation of any kind has only been in the building code since the late 1980s. The poor quality of the housing is one of the factors that has led us to build our own house.

Boy Racers. In New Zealand you can legally drive at 15, you don't need insurance and Japanese muscle cars are cheap and easy to come by. As a result most Friday and Saturday nights in town are blighted by the sound of boy racers doing burnouts and donuts. This is one of the reasons why we've decided to move out to the country!

The 'She'll be right' attitude. The flip side of 'Kiwi can do', and the reason why the houses are so shoddy, is a 'bodge it and make do' attitude, which Kiwis call 'she'll be right'. There is a common belief that everything can be fixed with a piece of number nine fencing wire, which is probably a spin-off from the first European settlers. Often, tradesmen here use this attitude as an excuse for not doing a proper job.

Kiwi TV. We're clutching at straws here for number four, but the TV is probably the strongest candidate for this slot. In the UK we were used to watching the BBC, which is advert-free. Over here, all channels carry adverts, which are monumentally bad, and far more frequent than the adverts on the commercial channels in the UK. Combine this with distinctly amateurish TV programmes and the outcome is that we'll be selling our TV when we move into our cabin.


4 highlights of the last four years

The Arrivals hall at Auckland Airport

Making a success of emigrating. The process of emigrating halfway around the world was time-consuming, extremely expensive and very, very stressful. However, having come out the other end, it has given us a new perspective on life. We're now far more pro-active in steering our lives in the direction we want them to go.

Exploring New Zealand. The place we now call home is such a beautiful country. We've thoroughly enjoyed the exploration we've done so far, and look forward to discovering even more in the future. For me (Helen), studying the Maori culture and language has been very rewarding, too.

Establishing our new careers. We've both made a clean break from primary school teaching, and we're both loving what we do now. Iain gets a lot of satisfaction from his job, and I relish being self-employed, and spending all day mucking about with words!

Buying a 'lifestyle block'. As soon as we 'got over' emigrating, we started looking around for a fresh challenge, and found one in July 2007, when we signed a contract to buy 8 acres of farmland out in the sticks.


4 things we're looking forward to

Establishing our new home. This will be our biggest challenge yet. We've got to learn how to build a house, design a garden, grow fruit and vegetables, manage 8 acres of land, look after livestock, and adapt to living in the country.

The 'Good Life'

Changing our lifestyle. Even though our quality of life is much better than it was in the UK, our lifestyle is still basically the same. We live in the suburbs, and do all the typical townie things. By moving out to the country we're going to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. Mind you, Iain's more than happy to swap his lattes for home brew!

Travelling. Once the house build is out of the way, we're planning on spending most of our spare cash travelling around this part of the world, visiting places that always sounded very exotic when we lived in the UK. Australia, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands are all on our list!

Becoming New Zealand citizens. We haven't got long to wait for this one -- our citizenship ceremony is on May 8th. After that we will apply for NZ passports. Iain plans to call himself a New Zealander from now on, whereas I'm happy to have a foot in both camps.

Did the earth move for you?

Carlo the concrete guy has been a busy bee this week - he's just finished the track and has now downed tools while he waits for the plumber to do his stuff. The power guy has buried 300m of very expensive cable somewhere under the site. When the phone guy came to lay his cable, like all good workmen, he sucked in his breath, shook his head and said, "You'll be needing another pole for that." He did manage to get the cable in though, so we won't have to resort to two tin cans and a long piece of string.

The next step is for the plumber to do his bit and the inspector to come and check it over.
Whenever I hear the word 'inspector' I can't help thinking of Blakey off 'On the Buses'. Hopefully he remembers his clipboard!

Carlo's little digger creates some parking space

Our deck and veranda still need a bit of work.

Easter

Easter kicked off with an office Easter egg hunt, which involved hurtling around foggy country roads and doing a range of dares in order to earn our Easter choccies! A fair amount of alcohol was consumed and I suspect there were a few sore heads this morning. Somehow we conspired to leave all our Easter eggs behind!

Our Easter egg team Dean, Helen, Nicole & me

Over the last few days our concrete guy, Carlo, has been very busy digging out a track and boxing up the slab ready for pouring sometime next week. The electrician and phone company are coming to lay their cables before the hardcore goes down on the drive and the plumber is pencilled in to come and stick bits of pipe into the foundations before the concrete gets poured. It's all getting rather exciting now - hopefully it won't be long before we can get stuck into the building proper. I've booked 3 weeks off work in anticipation of the slab being finished, so hopefully it all goes according to plan.

The partially excavated drive

Carlo's mate, Eric, using subtlety and precision to place the boxing for the foundation slab

Me testing out the drive

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

A Night Under the Stars

To celebrate finally getting the title to our thistly field, we decided to camp out there last night. Helen grabbed this piccy, although a camera can't really do justice to how spectacular the night sky was.

Here are a few more photos we took while we were there.

A view down to the neighbour's woolshed

A view to the far side of the valley

A view towards our gate

Me doing a spot of weeding

At last!

We are now the proud owners of a field full of thistles!

The title on our land came through today. It's only taken 19 months. :( The next step is to submit a building consent application (on Monday) and then wait for the council approval. In theory they have to deal with it inside 20 working days, but that resets if they ask a lot of questions - which, being a council, they probably will. I'm hoping it'll take maybe 6 weeks and then Carlo, out Canadian concrete guy, can put in an access track and get the slab down, and the electrical contractor can hook up some temporary power to the site.

The next few weekends will be spent grubbing thistles and figuring out how the hell to manage the place. Anyone got a hovercraft sized Flymo they want to lend me?

Happy New Year

Hope you have a great 2009!

We've been a bit slack on the blogging front for the last few months - sorry about that! The house is in limbo at the moment, but looks like it'll all come together fairly soon - we're busy getting quotes for all sorts of stuff and will probably put all house related things in a different blog and give a blow by blow account of all the details when it's done. We're over the whole waiting thing now and want to get started.

In other news, we've been granted citizenship! We have to attend a ceremony in the next few months, then we can apply for NZ passports which will give us travel & work rights in Oz amongst other things. For us, it's a statement that NZ is the place we call home and feel comfortable in. The UK seems a long way off and a distant memory now.

My work is looking interesting for 2009 - I'm developing the distance & e-learning aspects of our course, so no full-time teaching for me anymore. I'll be delivering workshops in various parts of the country and putting together an internet delivery option for 2010. So 24 days of teaching adults in a workshop setting, maybe 30 days or so of visiting and observing students in schools and the rest of time spent developing new course materials and playing with computers. Exciting stuff - I'm not sure how I'm going to fit it all in, but it'll be fun trying!

Helen is busy as heck - she's currently doing digital photography course and is working flat out with her writing. She has also landed her dream gig next year, as she's being commissioned to write some children's fiction. There's also prospects of some African work again during 2009.

Looking good this year, now we just need that land title to arrive....

Growing, growing...!

In an earlier post I think I may have mentioned that, back in March, we collected and planted the seeds from some native trees. They took ages to germinate, and lots of the seeds failed to do anything at all, but six months on we have about half a dozen healthy-looking seedlings. We've managed to identify the trees they'll eventually grow into (providing the rabbits/possums/insects don't get them first, of course.)

Kowhai
(pronounced KAW-figh)

Kowhai are small trees, growing to a height of only about 8 metres. They're so common that the kowhai flower is the official national flower of New Zealand. Many species of kowhai are deciduous, which is unusual for a native New Zealand tree (most are evergreen). The tree gets its name from the Māori word, kōwhai, meaning 'yellow'.

Pookie poses with our baby kowhai trees

Kowhai bloom on bare branches in early spring

Raucous tui love eating the nectar of the kowhai flowers

Matai
(pronounced MAT-eye)

Matai is a type of native pine tree that grows up to 40 metres high. The seeds are dispersed by the kereru (New Zealand pigeon), which eats the matai berries and passes the seeds in its droppings. In the past the timber was used in house building, especially for flooring.

Our matai seedling (I don't think it's big enough to be classed as a sapling yet!)

A mature matai- we'd better not plant ours too close to the house!

Among the birds our matai should attract is the kereru (the New Zealand pigeon)

Hope you enjoyed the pics.

Helen

Back to square one

We had some disheartening news this week.

The first of the builder's estimates has come in for our house, and it's almost 50% above our upper budget limit. It's looking unlikely we'll be able to build the house Phil designed for us. The the other two builders' estimates will probably be pretty similar; if anything, they're likely to be higher, as they're both registered master builders and the bloke who's already submitted his quote isn't.

We'll wait until we get the other two quotes in, then we'll make an appointment to see Phil and discuss our options, but with one third of the total cost needing to be trimmed, and with few frills, only one bedroom, and the fact that we're already planning on doing most of the interior fit-out ourselves, there's not much room to make the radical cuts needed.

As well as being disappointed, we also feel disgruntled with Phil, because his estimate of what the design would cost was so far out. We made our budgetary constraints clear to him when we had our initial meeting, and he assured us he could design something that would come within them, give or take the usual 10% margin of error. We knew we were taking a calculated risk when we employed an architect to draw up plans, but it still smarts a little, knowing we've spent $3,500 for nothing.

So it looks as if we're back to square one with our 'grand design', and we'll need to spend more time re-evaluating all the options open to us. On the positive side, the collapse of our plans may force us down a more adventurous path - of building our own home out of adobe bricks, for example, or of living in a yurt. While neither of these possibilities could be considered an easy option, either of them would give us an exciting change of lifestyle, and an opportunity for personal growth.

Maybe things not going according to plan isn't such a bad thing after all!

Helen

Our neighbours are building an ark...

...not really, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were, because it's been raining incessantly for weeks. It's great news for the reservoirs, which are not only our source of water, but also a major source of power, but it's a bit of a drag for any animal not endowed with scales or webbed feet (or preferably both, like this little fella).

The Lesser Duckodile

Rather frustratingly, we've not been able to do anything related to the house build over the last few weeks. There's nothing else we can do until we get the estimates back from the builders and that's probably another week away yet. As far as being granted title to the land is concerned, we've just going to have to keep on waiting. Part of my daily daydreaming time has been spent thinking up possible names for the house once we've built it, and one idea that came to me this week is 'Manawa-nui' which means 'patience' in the Māori language. The other name I'm threatening to give the house is 'The Hermitage', which is my way of pulling Iain's leg about his desire to get away from it all. Any other house name suggestions welcome.

One of the things we have been able to do in the last couple of weeks is to submit our application for New Zealand citizenship. The process can take a while to complete - up to eight months, apparently, but the application process is ten times easier than applying to emigrate, and when it's complete we'll be eligible to apply for New Zealand passports, which opens up Australia and many of the pacific islands as visa-free destinations. We're not going to give up our British citizenship, but it will be nice to feel as though we really belong in our adopted homeland.


In the last few weeks a couple of the writing projects I've been working on lately have been published. As part of my contract I usually get a couple of free copies of each title, and it's always exciting to see the finished product. Here are some pics:

Boost English - a series of 21 workbooks for ages 4 to 12, for Pearson Education, Australia

Rocks and Minerals Workbook for Dorling Kindersley, UK

In desperation at the end-of-winter downpour, last week we went on a fantasy holiday to the little-known Pacific island of Tongmoaji. In case you were wondering, it was while we were on the island that we took the photo of the Duckodile.

A holiday snap: me doing the hula on the beach

Must dash -- still got to get the sand out of my smalls.

Helen