Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

It has been a case of same again for us with house progress this week - Bert on Wednesday and tradies on Friday. This time the tradies were plumbers who fitted the basin and vanity units in the shower room and downstairs toilet, and the gas cook top in the kitchen. Bert had brought the cook top with him on Wednesday, along with the door handles. It is quite a mighty device, but we need to have a non-combustable surface behind it to meet with its installation requirements. Our first choice is to the left over black tile from the shower room, but as an interim we have a couple of the grey tile off-cuts doing the job: We are really enjoying the basins the shower room and the replacement one in the downstairs loo, and they also take us another step along the path to completion. We have used the cook top already, doing some veg to go with dinner on Friday evening, and boiling eggs for breakfast yesterday - our first boiled eggs of the year! Our week began with a public holiday as Whanga...

Our week has been much quieter than we had hoped for in terms of tradies working on the house. It mirrored the previous week quite closely in that Bert called in on Wednesday and tradies (actual builders this time) came on Friday. Bert finished installing the downpipes from the guttering which is a great relief to me as we have had quite a bit of rain this week. He also took the warming drawer apart so that we were able to extract the instruction manual and we are therefore now able to use it and the oven. This meant we could make toast for the first time, so we celebrated by having some for lunch. On Friday Brodie and Devon arrived, and along with doing some detailing work round the windows on the outside of the house, they also fitted the doors (no handles yet). Not only does this mean that the privies are now private, but that the sewing room is no longer the “door storage facility”. Apart from the door handles and the hanging rail in the wardrobe, the room is now finished. It is ...

Looking back through my notes for the week, it has been much busier than my own recollection indicates. The Christmas and summer holidays continue, so we haven’t had our hoped for flood of tradies. However, progress has been made. Bert the Project Manager came over and we went through all our issues as there is still much to do. While he was here he got the hot water working, so after he left we celebrated with showers (first time I have had properly wet ears this year) and a glass of wine each with dinner. We also have hot water connected to all the taps. On Friday the electricians came and finished installing the internal lights, got all the power sockets working, and fitted the oven, microwave and warming drawer. The lighting particularly has been a revelation, and we were much later to bed on Friday than we have been previously this year. On Saturday night we ran the dishwasher for the first time. There were three electricians and they had stuff and dust everywhere, so we went over...

We have been camping in our house for over a week now, and have got it looking as tidy as we can. In the coming week that should all change as we hope to have tradies in to continue with plumbing, electrics, kitchen appliances, wardrobe fittings and doors. Outside there is draining, cladding and painting to be attended to. The week began with a public holiday, and a lovely dawn. This was the view from our bedroom window at 6.24am: To prepare ourselves to the day ahead we had left over croissants for breakfast with scrambled eggs (life is hard at times). This was followed with the Ceremony of The Letter Box. Our Corten steel sign was screwed to pegs which Nicky had retrieved from the builders’ rubble, then the pegs were hammered into the ground. The beautiful red wine box which was now reincarnated as our letter box had it’s gold numbers attached, and then was screwed to one of the pegs. It is, many would say, an impressive construction, that may or may not fall over in the next coup...

That’s 2020 over with then. It has been quite a year hasn’t it. The “big” things have of course been Covid-19 and moving house. I am not going to do a detailed review of the year Dear Reader, because if you are a Dear Reader then you have either read it all before, or can go back through the blog and read it again! Where I will recap a little is with our house move. This time last year we were fresh faced land owners. As I sit down to start writing this week’s post, I am sitting in a camping chair in what will become the dining area of our home, once it is finished and our belongings have arrived. We are nearly there, but not quite. Last Sunday was our last night of hastily arranged accomodation at the holiday park. They have been really good to us and stored our frozen food in one of their own freezers so that it didn’t disappear from the communal freezers while we were in Ōhakune. After a cool start to accompany our packing we returned to Tīramaroa to do some more cleaning before ...