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

Whittaker Witterings

Blimey, where have the last three weeks gone? Is it really that long since I last posted to the blog?!

I'm very excited about our new 'Visitor locations' map, which some of you may have noticed on your previous visit. In the last fortnight we've had more than ten hits from the UK (hi Relatives and The Burton Crowd!), at least one from Canada (hi Donna & Doug!), and at least one from Auckland (hi Carin & Jim and/or Ian & Carol!) I know these are pathetically small numbers, but they're tremendously encouraging for us, because if only one other person is reading this blog apart from us two, (and of course Richard D, who doesn't really count)*, then it's worth doing. 

Iain's latest obsession is with learning to play the keyboard, and in recognition of the fact that he's stuck it with for the last four or five months or so (nothing short of a miracle where Iain's concerned), he's treated himself to a Roland something-or-other. Not Orzabal -- he was the bloke in Tears for Fears with Curt Smith -- but a type of synthesizer. A set of headphones was an essential companion purchase for reasons I'm sure I don't need to go into.

If Iain gets a synthesizer for sticking with the keyboard for five months, I'm beginning to wonder what I might be entitled to for sticking with yoga for eight years - I'm sure it must be worth a yoga studio, at the very least! Actually what I'd really like is to have not only the intellectual understanding that I am, in fact, one with the universe, but also the ability to feel it. Think I'd better stick with the meditation.** It's just a shame that it's so bloody hard. 

As far as the house build is concerned, in the last three weeks we've:

i) received a letter from our solicitors saying, to paraphrase, 'Goodness me, this land purchase is taking a long time!' (It was nice of them to tell us, otherwise we wouldn't have known.)

ii) had another letter from ours solicitors containing a copy of a letter from the vendor's solicitors saying they can't give us an estimate of how much longer it will take

and

iii) sent off copies of the plans to three local builders for a rough estimate. 

The weather has been pretty bad over the last few weeks. Storm after storm has battered the country, but we've got off pretty lightly here; in other parts of New Zealand there's been extreme winds, severe flooding, landslides and power outages. Nevertheless, the days are beginning to draw out, and when it stops raining long enough for the sun to come out, it's been getting almost warm, so spring, although not here yet, is definitely within sniffing distance. 

I've just realised I've gone rambling on for ages and I've not got any photos to break up the monotony. So here's a gratuitous cat photo (it's my post and I'll put in whatever photos I like! :P)

Right, that's all for now.

Catch up with you again soon.

Helen

___________

* Only kidding, Richard!

** Or should that be medication?

Developed concept plans

Hello everyone; this week’s blog post is a little different from normal. Instead of typing in the text, I'm dictating it. No, I haven’t employed a personal assistant; I'm trying out a computer dictation program.

I've been spending so many hours a day typing, I've been getting a lot of pain in my hands and arms. I'm not able to cut down on the amount of writing I do, but I can hopefully find a way of cutting back on the amount of time I spend pounding away at the keyboard. By using a dictation program I might eventually be able to reduce my keyboard time by 25% or so. It takes a lot of getting used to, though. You have to speak very clearly, and even then it's not 100% accurate. You always need to go back when you’ve finished, and correct the mistakes. Iain has tried it out, but didn't get very good results. Maybe the program didn't like his Stoke accent!

Last weekend we drove down to Wellington to see a rugby test between New Zealand and South Africa. Even though we've lived in New Zealand for over three years, this is the first time we've seen the All Blacks play live. The atmosphere at the match was excellent, and it was great to be able to cheer the All Blacks to a home win. It's a refreshing change for English people like us, to be able to support a national team that isn't woefully inept. :-)

On Friday our architect, Phil, sent us the developed concept plans of our little house. He's added a carport on the eastern side of the house, and we think this will not only be practical, but will also help to visually balance the roofline. At the moment the plans show a store and woodshed on the southern side of the house, but we've decided to get rid of these, which will open up the back of the house, and allow more light into the bathroom and laundry. We think a couple of cheap sheds off the driveway will do the job just as well, for a fraction of the price.

The pictures below give a rough idea of what the front of the house will look like. (Apart from the fact that Blogger has mangled the colours for some reason; must be going through its Blue Period.)

Two views of the front of our house (click for a larger image)

The choice of cladding will make a big difference to the way the house looks. We think we’ll probably go either with board and batten, in a plain wood finish, like the first photo, (except not blue!) or else with a vertically grooved board, painted red, as in the second photo.

The 'board and batten' cladding style --

it looked good when I uploaded it! :-(

The 'Shadowclad' cladding style (this is our rental in Titirangi)

The developed concept plans include a specification list, so we’re now at the point where we can get some quotes from builders. This is an exciting stage of the process, but it's also pretty nerve wracking. If the quotes come in way over budget, we may have to rethink our whole plan, give up our dream of a one-off cabin, and opt for something a bit more standard. We’ll also have wasted all the money we've already paid the architect. Still, we knew the risk we were taking when we started off down this road, and as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

About three months ago, we started collecting seeds from trees whenever we went out for a walk. We've been planting them up, and we now have a collection of seedlings of various native trees, only a couple of which we know the names of. Hopefully, some of these will survive long enough so that we can plant them out in our new garden. Next week, we’re going to make a start on growing some fruit trees. The climate here is mild enough for lemons and olives, so we're going to collect stones and pips, soak them overnight, plant them out, and see what happens.

Well, I'd better go now, as it's my bedtime! Catch you again soon.

Helen

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