September 2016 - building consent is being processed

September has gone by quickly, and I have a good excuse for being a couple of days late in writing - we had guests for the weekend. It's so exhausting having guests, it feels like there hasn't even been a weekend.

So the month started with two weeks of stress while waiting for the architect to get the right information to the city council. After a rather rude and obnoxious email (from him to me that is), I took a step back and left the rest of the building consent stuff to the other half. Finally we got an email from the council with an invoice attached. so we paid that right away and a couple of days later they confirmed that they had the payment and had begun processing our building consent. So finally a bit of good news and a clear time frame - they have to have it sorted in 20 working days. Which brings us to about the 19th of October.

As for the house in the factory - we have not yet got a new time frame for that. I keep asking when it will be transported but have not yet got an update. We have got photos though, and can see that it has now been painted and is waiting for the kitchen and bathrooms to be installed. Then it will be ready.

No other news from this end. Work is the same. Life is pretty tiring. Weather has improved a lot and the evenings are a lot lighter. It's actually been warm enough for shorts and t-shirt twice! At Wainui the weeds and grass are starting to grow pretty quickly so the next thing to do is buy a weed-whacker and start taking care of things. Here in the city it's time to start thinking of packing. I sold our spare tv and the ugly couches are next on the list. I packed up all my fabric and next I'll pack books and ornaments, and other semi-useless things that we won't need for a few weeks. If things go really well we might be able to move at the end of October. But we have our holiday in Rarotonga booked, so it might end up being after that!

Time to go hang up more washing and feed the dog.

August 2016 - still working on building consent

For all of this month, we have been waiting. Every week the architect suggests that the documents we need are nearly ready and he will send them soon. This time he sounds quite certain; he is now calling it a package and asks if we want it emailed or in hardcopy. So maybe tomorrow we can finally apply for consent. This guy definitely makes mountains out of molehills though. His latest email suggested that we would need to print two copies of everything and take it to the council. Should we really be trusting a so-called professional that is so misinformed and behind the times that he doesn't know that councils have online portals for consent applications?

If we get the consent application in this week, maybe we will have the house on site by the end of September. So only a month late. The house itself is going well, not quite on schedule or it would be finished already. But it has walls and cladding, this week they will probably put in the bathroom and kitchen. Then painting, and then it's ready for the site.

The site is almost ready for the house too. The land has been scraped flat and the bank cut for the retaining wall. They are also now waiting on the documents from the architect, as the earthworks team don't trust that the architect won't change the placement of the house or something silly like that. I guess they have had some unsatisfactory dealings with him in the past.  It doesn't add to our confidence in him, that's for sure. And this is the new architect that the company contacted because the old one was no good. Doesn't say much for the profession.

My best guess at this stage is that our house will be ready at the end of September.  We need to buy a fridge and a couch, and we have been given a really nice dining table and chairs from Nathan's parents. So that also means we have a month to clean up our current house and sell our furniture and the extra tv. I have two bolts of really nice curtain fabric, and the rest of the house can wait because the next big spend (after the consent that is) will be a fence for part of the section. All my plants are currently in pots and buckets so I'll have an instant garden when we move. Everything is planned and we are just waiting for a bit of security around the date. In the meantime we're paying rent and mortgage, which is starting to take a heavy toll.

Let's finish with photos. I'm posting from my phone again so no photoshopping today, just a bunch of photos.

July 2016 - building consent

Today's post is coming to you two days late for a couple of reasons. First, I have been so sick with a cold. Second, there is something wrong with my computer - it is going so slow, it takes about 5 minutes to do every single little thing. It was never a good computer but not this bad, I think I need to reboot it back to factory settings. But first I need the patience to transfer some files to a hard drive, which in its current state could take hours! Sip this morning I am once again writing on my phone, on the bus. It's a clear morning, the sun is just up and the horizon is all orange.

In news this month, wet have been struggling to finish cleaning up the land and to get our building consent sorted. We haven't finished either. The land is nearly done, we need to get some rubbish taken away and then we're ready for the site works. The building consent has been a nightmare. We started looking into it ages ago, and the company told us they would supply the information about the house that we would need, and that we didn't need a surveyor. We talked to the council and they said we were pretty much sorted, just needed one more technical drawing. But out seems that our contract at Matrix didn't nearly know much about the building consent and the information she gave us wasn't much good. The main mix up was because, while we are doing site consent, they are arranging it to be installed on site, so we assumed that they would have sorted out all the information around installing on site. So what we are missing is a technical drawing showing the drainage on the site, to the sewage and stormwater connections. They only supplied the house drainage. And there is no clarity in the contract about this sort of thing, so we had some tense conversations. Basically, we are of the opinion that of the company were not going to supply this, they should have told us we needed to arrange a draftsman to do it. After all, their subcontractor will need the drainage plan when it comes time to lay the drains. Now, I don't know if we are right in our assumptions, but their architect is now sorting out some new drawings for us so I guess we aren't completely wrong.

The result of all this is that we should have had our consent application submitted last week, and now it probably won't be fine till next week. So maybe the house won't arrive till September. The delay can't be pinned on us luckily, otherwise the contract would have us paying an extra $100 a day for every day that it stays in the factory after completion. Even if we had the site drainage plan sorted on time, the architect has made changes to the way the two modules join, so we need new drawings for that and an updated foundation design anyway. So all in all, it could be worse, we could be in a situation that was going to cost us a lot of money. But I'm still not happy with the delay, I'm sick of our rented house, I want my nice new house.

So the plan for this month is to get building consent, do our site works, and hopefully have our house delivered. Also have to go down to Christchurch for a weekend, for a midmid-winter Christmas with Nathan's family. Also have to really start packing up our stuff! And make curtains and go couch shopping. So the pace is definitely not slowing any time soon.

Here's an update on the house:

June 2016

The year is officially half over, which is pretty hard to believe. As far as we know, they haven't actually started building our house yet, Apparently it will still be complete and out of the factory on time though. We have continued to clear weeds off of the land, and now we have a huge pile of green waste to deal with. The plan for this weekend is to hire a mulcher and get rid of it. Then we are free to get our earthworks booked in. We have resource consent, we just have to arrange for a council inspection. So that's the plan for July. August is supposed to be delivery. September we'll be moving in.

The big new for June is that my poor old car died.


I had really been hoping that she would last another year or so. Buying a new car just wasn't part of the plan for this year. But there had been more issues cropping up in the last couple of warrants, and we knew she was reaching the end of her life. One day at the start of June we saw there was smoke coming from under the hood, and there was a smell of burning rubber. We hoped it was not big deal, I thought it was just out of oil, but after a top-up it kept happening, and we realised there was oil leaking. The mechanic confirmed that the head gasket had blown, and it would cost more to fix than was worth spending on that car. We had to buy a new car, but to do that we had to keep driving the broken car, hoping it would just keep going long enough. It would have been nice to have a bit more time to think about it and find the right car, We pretty much had just a single day. Drive out to the car yards in Lower Hutt, look at cars, and make a decision. I wanted to spend more money, and hopefully get a car that would last us a good long time. But in the end we found a very cheap station wagon with a big engine, it will do what we need and hopefully will last longer than expected. We have added a tow bar so we can hire a mulcher, tow a trailer full of furniture, and fit loads in the boot.

It would have been nice to have some time for second thoughts, but driving home from car shopping that day, with night coming on a rain pouring down, the window wipers jammed up. One got stuck on the other, and bent out of shape. Luckily when we turned up the speed they started again, but jamming with every swipe. We managed to get off the motorway and find somewhere to pull over, but we couldn't really fix the wipers. We managed to bend the broken one in such a way that they didn't jam so much, and we could safely drive home. But that was really the last straw. Luckily the next day wasn't rainy. We got the new car checked by a mechanic and went ahead and bought it. Got more than expected when we traded in my car for scrap. And now we have this huge beast of a car. It's automatic and I miss having gears. It's a lot slower to handle, there's so much more of it to move. And it will cost a lot more to run. But it will do what we need and the price was right. Maybe in a couple of years we can upgrade properly.

That's all the news. It's really cold here in Wellington right now, but overall it's been OK. Work is the same old, same old. It's a shame there are no more public holidays for awhile. I'd really like to come down south for a visit, but I missed my window to get cheap mid-year flights. Now I need to wait until I know for sure about the timing of the house. I can't risk missing it being finished, being delivered and of course, being handed over to us. So sometime after September I guess.

By this time next month I will have more land photos for you. The earthworks will be done, we'll have a clear building pad and driveway. And hopefully we'll have some photos of the house in the factory.

May 2016 - lots of hard work

This month has been very busy, and we have been working hard. Aside from the usual - work, walking the dog, hobbies, small amount of social life, we have been making plans and working on the land. The house is due to arrive in August, and before that we need to get our earthworks done, but we can't book that until the resource consent comes through. That should be quite soon though. Until then, we are working on the triangle of land that is furthest away from the house site. At first it seemed like an impenetrable mass of bush, with a steep, bumpy slope all covered in weeds. However, we soon found that the bumpy slope was actually a steep bank, where the previous owners had tossed all the green waste the last time that the land was worked on, leaving piles of tree branches with weeds and vines climbing over them. The impenetrable mass of bush was actually just a few trees, covered with a strangling vine. Here's the before shots:

This area is going to become my vegetable garden, and there's a lot more space there than we thought, now that we've cleared most the rubbish away. The neighbours have been dumping their compost down there for the past 15 years or so (the pile of brown stick-looking things is leaves from their banana tree) and they also had a pumpkin patch in that cleared area just this last autumn! The pumpkin patch was gone by the time we bought the property officially, but do you think they took all the vines away to their own compost pile? They most certainly didn't! The first fence that is going up will be on that border, because with the clearing done their yard is right there, and we want some boundaries. Plus, the lady reckons she's scared of dogs and Cher can't tell the difference between our land and theirs. The problem with putting up a fence is that they clearly don't realise where the boundary actually is, and our fence will cut across 'their' grass and the area where they let visitors park their cars. So that will be a very delicate conversation. We'll probably get on to it quite soon, before the house arrives, and just get it over and done with.

Now here are some after pictures. It looks sort of messy because removing all of the vine took away some of the branches and foliage of the trees (but most of the green in the images above is the vine). We also removed a sycamore. Now you can see that there is actually a lot of space under the trees there. The post with the mailboxes will have to move, otherwise it will be behind our fence. The sign for the construction company also has to go, we're not providing free advertising space for the neighbour's business!

So in the group of photos above you are looking down the bank that is shown on the left of the below photo. Now here we are looking from one end to the other, and you can see through the trees at the end to the street (so looking back to where the mailboxes above are sitting). We couldn't show a before shot of this view because all you could have seen was weeds and gorse. It looks quite messy, we have a long way to go. A retaining wall will tidy up the bank on the left, and the flat area below that will be garden beds for vegetables. Dividing our section from the neighbour's will be a tall trellis for beans and peas (in addition to the boundary fence that is). Under the trees will be the chicken house and run. And where I'm standing with the camera, and to the right of me, is a sunny spot where we can plant some fruit trees and maybe have a small glasshouse.

This weekend I'll take a couple of photos of the ever-growing pile of garden waste. We will have to hire a mulcher, there is too much of it to get rid of. We will finish clearing the spot above, it needs raking out. Above (to the left) is some very lumpy ground where all the dirt from the original excavation was dumped. We plan to smooth it out and add our own fill to it, from our site scrape, then plant grass. Hopefully within a month or so you will be able to see the shape of this garden area taking shape.

Now we have begun to tackle the other side, as we might as well get together as much as we can before we hire a mulcher. Up top there is another pile of branches that have just been dumped - only part of it is on our property but we'll have to move it all so that we can plant a hedge or something there. There is also a fair bit of gorse around the edges of our native bush area, below where the house will be. We've cut down some and planted a tree, and we'll get rid of a bit more just because we can really, and so that we have easier access to the patch of natives. There is a lot of just one type of exotic tree growing amongst the natives, I don't know what it is but I think I only want one example of that, so all the rest can go and be replaced. Slowly though, trees are expensive. 

Next month I will post photos of the other side, and point out what we will plant where, and how we will change the shape of the bank eventually. And just so you know, it is not just one neighbour that we are complaining about here, it is three different neighbours. One has not spoken to us yet. One has a construction company - and their sign is on our property, along with a pile of bricks that they best move real soon, or we will use them. And both these two have their mail boxes on our property. The last is the one that has been using our property as their compost bin, and whose yard crosses onto our section, and who is afraid of dogs. So it will be a delicate transition for us, so as not to really piss everyone off before moving in!

And as a parting shot, here is a picture of some cool slugs we found:

April 2016 - becoming landowners

April has been a very big month. After multiple delays on the land purchase, it finally went through on 15 April. We have the photo to prove it. I posted it on Facebook and everybody asked where is the house - well the house is a few months away yet and our next step is resource and building consent. Need to begin that process today actually. But anyway, first of all, just so you know what you are looking at below - the long flat bit of grass behind us in the first photo is where our house will be. It will be a long narrow house, because the less we dig into the slope the better. In the second photo you can see a whole lot of trees, with some toi-toi sticking up between a gap in the trees. In a few months our house will be sitting in front of the toi-toi, in amongst the native bush. The land was cleared at some point so it is quite low, scrubby native bush at the moment, with a lot of kanuka and ferns. In the bottom picture you can see the aerial photo of the land. It's 1400 square metres.

So we have had our contract with the prefab company sorted since March and have now made our first payment to them, so their first step is to get the building consent for building it in their factory in Upper Hutt. On top of that we need building consent for the actual house site in Lower Hutt, and resource consent because even though we are doing very minor site development (mostly just a site scrape), we are in a hill residential area, so every little thing needs resource consent. Luckily, it will be non-notified so it should only take a couple of weeks to sort. The build may already have started, or if not it will start very soon, as they can do the first stages in their factory before the building consent has come through. We will go to see it when the framework is up, and probably every couple of weeks after that - as often as they will let us. You can see below the house plans, so you have some idea of how big the land is. Of course, almost everything that is not being covered by the house is sloped, so we won't have a big yard or anything like that. Loads of space for creative gardens though. We want a garage but it will have to wait a couple of years. The house will be three bedrooms, with a large open living space (that's going to be in the middle where the two modules join together, and the 'L' shape is the kitchen).

Since the sale went through we've being going out there for a few hours on the weekend and getting into the scrub and weeds. We are working on the triangle off to the right in the picture, as there is no point doing work around the house site until after all the big trucks have been through and the house is actually there. We thought that the other part was lumpy, filled in ground, but it turns out that when the land was cleared in the first place, instead of disposing of the trees that they cut, they just dumped them down the slope. As you do. So what we have found is a whole lot of old bits of tree, maybe they are branches off of the same tree or maybe lots of small trees, grown over with climbing weeds so it's impossible to know if you're about to step onto the ground or a void. There's also lots of top soil there, so I'd say that when it was cleared they dumped the tree branches down there, then scraped the land and dumped that on top. So we're working on getting down to ground level so we can see the lay of the land properly. When we do our site scrape we will probably put the soil down there too, then work on forming a terraced vegetable garden. There's already a peach tree there to get me started on growing food. And the neighbours had cleared a small patch where there is a gap in their fence and planted a pumpkin patch there! Before our sale went through they picked their pumpkins, pulled up all the vines and dumped them off to the side, in amongst all the other weeds and compost that they've clearly been dumping there for years! How rude. I will definitely be building a fence there!

On the other side, around the house site, is the native bush area. There's a bit of a bare patch directly to the left of the house, where our bedroom window will look out to, so that will be where we start planting. Around there edges there is kanuka and some broadleaf trees, lots of ferns, and some stuff that I don't think is native. We don't want to de-stabilise the slope so we won't clear it, we'll just slowly replace the trees we don't like with nicer natives, ones with nice flowers and berries to attract birds. There's a bit of gorse to be taken care of as well. Up behind the house, at the top of the pictures above, is a steep bank that eventually we will terrace and dig some steps into, and we will make it into a cute little patio area, as that is the north side so will get good sun.

Finally there is that pizza wedge cut out of the property, which belongs to the old fella down below. The real estate agent indicated right from the start that the guy was keen to get rid of that bit of land, as it is way above the rest of his property, probably by about 5 metres. So we've met him, and we'll be friendly, and eventually the topic will come up and we'll see what happens.

So that's all the big stuff that's been keeping us busy. Work has just been same old. I've been to some conference/symposium things and I did some training courses. The weather here is still quite warm and dry, but it's much colder in the afternoons so I've pulled out all my warm winter clothes. We have to start going through all our cupboards and getting rid of stuff, we don't want to move all our clutter and junk with us! There's a big list of things I want but we might not be able to afford new things. We will need to buy a fridge, and probably a lawn mower right away, but things like new couches and dining set will probably have to wait. I need to make curtains, choosing fabric for that should be fun. It would be nice to have new stuff in the kitchen, stuff that matches, but that can wait as well. Right now we need to be as careful with money as possible, as we are already paying the mortgage as well as rent, and we will have some very big bills coming up for the consents and the site works. Which means that my plan to visit Invercargill for a weekend in the middle of the year is probably cancelled. People will just have to come up here to visit us instead. The same will probably apply to Christmas. But we will have a house, and it will be nice, so we will definitely be keen for visitors!

March 2016 - buying land

It is the very last day of March so I am right on time this month. It has been another very big month. Last month I told you about our offer on a piece of land. Now we have gone unconditional on that land and paid a deposit that was pretty much all of my savings. Scary. In another week it will be settlement and we will pay all the rest of the money that we have got together, and the bank will pay even more. In order to get our government Homestart grant for building a house, we need a building contract signed before we settle on the land, and then we will need to pay the first big deposit immediately. So tonight we have what is hopefully the second-to-last iteration of the contract (there are still a couple of things we need changed) - we hope to sign the contract tomorrow, but that will depend on our lawyer confirming something and them agreeing to it. Nevertheless, there is already a sold sign up on the land and as soon as we have gone out to take a photo I will put it here for you to see.

In March we have also gone on a road trip to Christchurch. It was both very quiet and quite eventful. It was quiet in that we didn't really do anything, just hung out with Nathan's family. We didn't do any day trips really, or go see stuff, somehow time just passed. It was also quite eventful though; Cher nearly caught a goose, I got a decent pair of new jeans for $10, we went to the CookieTime factory for cheap broken cookies, and I left my wallet on top of the car on the drive back up (luckily it was found when a truck ran over it and caused it to fly up, and the driver behind the truck saw and stopped to pick it up, and for some reason Mum's phone number was written on a receipt inside it). It was Easter and I definitely fell off of the healthy-eating wagon. I'm trying to get back on, but it's not easy when there are CookieTime cookies at work...

Tomorrow is April Fools day. I hope no-one gets up to anything at work, I am too tired to bother with that. I just want to get this building contract sorted. We have a good lawyer, so we'll see what he says in the morning.