November 2016 - trip to Rarotonga

Well I should have written this weeks ago but things have been pretty busy, with the house, with work, and with the earthquake disrupting pretty much everything.

So, to go back a whole month, at the start of November we went to Rarotonga. My first trip outside of NZ in three years and my first visit to a tropical island. We arrived at night and the owner of the apartment we were booked into picked us up at the airport. She was an old German lady, very chatty but a little hard to follow. She had a lei for each of us, made with fresh flowers - they smelled really good. The place we stayed was nothing fancy, one of a few bungalow style units just outside of the main town, and not on the beach. If we go again I will sort out the accommodation out earlier and get somewhere right on the beach. It was fine though, we had a wee deck looking out onto the garden and we never intended to spend much time hanging around there anyway. Instead we hired a scooter and got about the island on that.

On our first day I was determined to see the island and go swimming and drink out of a coconut. The day started off great but it clouded over and started to rain. Of course, by the time it seriously started to rain we were that far round the island that we couldn't tell if it was worthwhile going back or just waiting it out. We got pretty cold and wet - Nathan more so because he was driving and I was sheltered by him as I rode on the back of the bike. We finally stopped and took shelter at a minigolf course that had a restaurant and bar. The rain eased up and I wanted to go to the beach (which was just over the road) but it hadn't really stopped raining and we were cold so I had to concede that we better go back. We got soaked again. But then the rain cleared so we got changed and went back out, to see the other half of the island. We took jumpers this time. Once again, as soon as we were a decent distance from the town the rain started. And then got heavier. Before we knew it we were pretty wet again. We stopped again for a drink but the rain kept on so we just had to go out in it again and get wet. We did make it all the way around the island though - it's only 30k or so.

So we gave up on the outdoors and opened a bottle of rum, and played monopoly cards on the porch till it go dark. And finally the rain really cleared! Only it was 9pm already and when we headed out in search of food we found most places were closed or not serving food. Finally we found somewhere with the kitchen still open and ordered a pizza. I got my cocktail in a coconut and it was really nice. A band started up but we found we were too tired to hang around until the place really got going, which is apparently around midnight. So that was my first birthday, but Rarotonga is a day behind NZ so it was my birthday again the next day.

For my birthday in Rarotonga time the sun was shining and we started the day by going to the market. It was very touristy, as you might expect, and I wanted to buy everything. We got a drinking coconut to share, they are the young ones that are full of coconut water. It was OK, slightly weird tasting and quite filling. Nathan didn't like how the market was so targeted towards separating tourists from their money so we went on our way and found a beach. It was sunny and the water was far warmer than here, but still cooler than the air, which was good because it was really bloody hot. We swam and I found some pretty seashells to take home. We both got sunburnt, we had sunscreen but between sweating in the heat and swimming, it had worn off. We spent that day driving around the island, stopping at places that looked good to swim at. We didn't go anywhere fancy for a birthday dinner, instead  asked to go on one of the lagoon cruises. So with that planned for the Sunday we just took it easy for Saturday. Found a good burger joint. Had an ice-cream. Drank more rum and felt sorry for myself for being so sunburnt.

The lagoon cruise on Sunday was really good. There are several but we chose the one that has been around the longest. It starts by going out on a boat and the guys tell you about Rarotonga until you get to the marine reserve. Then they hand out snorkels and you get in the water and look at fish. It was cool. We didn't see as much as the time I was scuba diving in Oman, but it's way easier and cheaper than scuba diving! We saw lots of cool colourful fish though, and then the boat took us to an island and there was a beach BBQ, with tuna and lots of delicious fresh fruit. After food there are demonstrations - one of the crew climbed a coconut tree, then they showed us how to husk a coconut, and how to tie a sarong in a few different ways. I volunteered Nathan, he didn't appreciate it. And after husking a coconut he showed us how they grate out the inside and squeeze it to make coconut cream. It was awesome. They told us that there was a night market if we wanted a feed that evening, so we headed to that later in the evening. It was like a huge pot-luck dinner with a whole lot of strangers. There were stalls all around the edge of this carpark full of trestle tables, and the stalls had all sorts of food like BBQ and various sorts of cuisine from around the world, plus baked goods and desserts. We had BBQ and we tried the local raw fish delicacy, called ike-mata. It was marinated in some sort of lemon and coconut cream sauce with onion and other good stuff. I was wary and made Nathan try it first but it was actually delicious and I ate it all. Then we bought pineapple pie, apparently another local favourite - it was incredibly bland. Luckily the chocolate cake we also brought was really good and so was the ice-cream. The night market was so worth going to.

The Monday was our last day and we stayed in the main town for it. We shopped and looked in most of the jewellery stores to find me a birthday present. The Cook Islands are famous for their black pearls and we looked at pendants, bracelets and rings. Finally we settled on a really classy silver ring with a dark blue/green pearl. It fit me perfectly, but it turned out my hands were a bit swollen in the heat because when I got back to NZ it was too big! I shopped for a few small souvenirs, but not many because food there was really expensive so I had pretty much run out of money. I got the obligatory seashell souvenir and a fridge magnet to add to my collection. Then we pretty much just had to pack up our things and wait until our very late flight at 2am. It wasn't really a fun wait. There is a hotel with a restaurant and bar across the road from the little airport and it was awful. The pizza was awful, the music was bad, the ice-cream sundae was not even as good as a MacDonald's one and the service was not great. When it was late enough to check in for our flight, we discovered that Nathan's new passport didn't have his NZ visa information so that was a huge hassle! But finally we were on our way, we had a long uncomfortable jetstar flight back home, and arrived in Welly to a broken down car (it just needed a new key, it's all better now).

So that was my birthday holiday, feels like forever ago. It has been a pretty hectic month since, but I'm done writing for today so maybe I'll talk about that another time. I will add photos soon - they are on my computer in Wellington and I am in Invers right now so that will have to wait.

October 2016 - Our house has arrived

I think this month I will largely let the photos speak for themselves, because everything has been incredibly stressful and if I get started I will just start ranting. Like, I'm not going to go into the torture that our building consent became, with requirements to get our retaining wall designed by an engineer, and then build a barrier above it, and then tell them exactly where we would build the barrier and not only the specifications of the barrier but the actual materials we would use to build it, as if they didn't trust us to just go to Bunnings and get fence materials. Did they think we would build it out of sticks and string or something?! And let's not get into the incredibly tight timeframe we ended up with, where the building consent actually only arrived the very day before the house was moved onto site. Or the minimal communication that still leaves me a bit unsure as to when it will be finished and we can move. And how many extra payments we are suddenly in store for, with the engineered wall that will be at least twice as big (therefore twice as expensive) as the original plan, the extra fence, the extra building consent payment (building levies, that I'm pretty sure we also paid with the Upper Hutt building consent), something extra for some of the piles because the ground was too hard to drive them in (I don't even know how they solved that one), and all sorts of things like that. At this point we can only grin and bear it. We will be super broke for awhile, but at least once we're there we won't be paying rent as well as mortgage.

And before we get to the photos, just to let you know, going to Rarotonga for my birthday, so I'll post a mid-November update with pictures of beautiful beaches, and hopefully I'll be less stressed next week!

Now for the photo reel:

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: