Just kidding Mr Councilman. :)

No sense of humor those guys.

We didn’t actually celebrate much beyond a couple of “WOO HOOs” cause I think we’re kinda tired but yes we’re very, very happy too. There’s still work to do on the house but it’s the little things like painting the window frames for the fifteenth time and all the little woody bits that go around the floor and ceiling but mostly there. At least now we can actually relax a bit more when we’re there. Yippee!

Done, of course, has nothing to do with all the bits and pieces we still need to get to…like the skirtings and the wood that goes around the windows and doors (Seb knows what it’s called but he’s in the middle of sanding the floor in our Auckland house so I can’t ask him). What else needs to be done? Oh yes, the little baguette that goes where the ceiling and wall meet. We also need to put a treatment on the floor. I need to fix the paint on the outside of the house around the doors and windows because it’s a hideous shade of green. A green which I might add looked beautiful inside the house. But looks like radioactive vomit on the outside. Nice, no? Ah yes, and then there’s the garden.

I’m thankful for the times our friends come up to Mahakirau with us because it means we’ll actually get to relax…so here’s an open invitation to our friends!

Happy new year!!!

So we employed our fabulous builder, Peter, to help us with the gib board and it was a good thing we did. It was a hell of a lot of work and it took four days to do it. One day he and one of his builders did the hard part of the vaulted ceiling then Peter and Seb worked together the next day to do one bedroom and part of the living room. Then it was just me and Seb to do the rest. We managed to break one board trying to fit it into the bedroom…what a disaster. Thankfully we had a few extra boards. When the gib was done it took us a while to get used to the new look of the house. All of a sudden it looked new…far from the old cottage look we were hoping to achieve. It will come with time.

We employed a stopping company (stopping is the plastering over the gib joints) to finish up the work on the gib. We would have done it ourselves but after a few people including our builder told us how difficult it was we thought it wise to employ professionals. These guys were done in two days. They were messy as hell but I’m sure they were less messy than we would have been and they saved us days of work.

So now we’re onto the painting. Seb did a beautiful job of installing some wood panelling in the bathroom and finished it with a delicate curved edge. We painted the wood panelling a light beige and painted the wall above a light cream colour. I painted the bathtub a shiny green apple shade so it  will stand out as the feature of the bathroom. We’re going to leave the feet of the tub blue for some fun contrast.

I painted the bedrooms a very light cream colour and each room will have a bright contrasting wall. In the main bedroom it will be a medium greenish yellow and the second bedroom will be orange. I’m not sure we would have really gone for orange but Seb wanted dark red and I wanted bright yellow because it’s a small dark bedroom so you can see how we arrived at orange.

We’re still deciding what to do about the kitchen. I would like to tile the countertops so I’m wary of not choosing colours before we find the right tile, which is like finding a needle in a haystack here at the bottom of the world. But that’s another story.

We’ll probably take a bit of a break from our lovely cottage because we just bought a house in the city (YAY!) and it needs some work as well. We’re gluttons for punishment.

Late February we started to sleep in the house, even when walls were not finished, it was fun. Since then the place has been enclosed, the verandah finished (and very much used to keep working while heavy rain was pouring in the mountain some week-ends), and a lot of furniture has found its way in already! Beds, recycled kitchen cabinets, tables and chairs, a-ton-heavy old claw foot bathtub, an old scruffy arm chair to sit in front of the wood stove that Seb picked up on the side of the road. Ah oui ! The wood stove has been in for quite a while now and is already put to use every week-end. It looks great and gives good heat especially in the loft area ;-)

So, with all this installation, it became easier to work and live up there, and progress became very apparent. With the help of my brother Julien visiting from France, we installed the old staircase our builder has extracted from one of his sheds. Julien – who is a professional cabinet maker back in France – carved a beautiful frog in the supporting pole, which is now the centrepiece of the main room!

From then, it was a fellowship of friends that contributed to the place.  David helped build a concrete pad for the gas bottles, sanded and fitted all inside doors.  Charlotte, Clement, Kristel and Simon gave 8 hands on the outside railing painting in exchange for shelter & a memorable full lamb barbecue night at a neighbour’s place.  Lizzie installed most of the plumbing work.  Kevin gave us all guidance and cables to wire the whole house…

So in less than a few week-ends, we have now finished all the electrical wiring, most of the plumbing, the inside doors, the gas fitting (water heater & stove), the outside steel railing, the deck oiling, the front door varnishing…

And last week-end, at last, all converged to be ready for our pre-lining inspection. Karen spent the week-end working furiously to fit the insulation in all exterior walls while I had to finish the millions of bits and pieces everywhere. It seems this comes at point for the freezing cold that hit us that week-end, which put the batts and the wood stove to the test.

Hopefully, inside wall linings should happen next week-end, with the help of our favourite builder, Peter. We will have inside walls like a normal house!

To be continued…

We originally planned to leave the external walls made of plywood and battens untreated so that they get naturally weathered. Well, naaa… this ‘new box’ looking house didn’t look right to us, and waiting for it to weather would be too long! We decided to stain it before they completed the cladding. What a great decision! The next week-end, on our late Friday arrival, we were stunned by how good it looks in this chocolate colour. It enhanced the windows and doors and gave it more character.

Since the house was not finished and we couldn’t start any work inside, we did a clean up of the tipi, finding all kinds of weird insects and slugs that made it their home. We also built the water pump box behind the tank. The following weekend we started oiling our timber ceiling. We also enjoyed a lot of good sun after the very cold Atlanta winter… And finally we had our first nights inside our new home! First with the foam mattresses, then with a better bed brought from Auckland, in the loft area under the beautiful tongue and groove timber ceiling.

Now that our builder has finished working inside, we started the flooring project.  We had been looking at options for recycled flooring all across Auckland region. We wanted either Kauri, Rimu or Matai floorboards. Most demolition yards stock such timber in various conditions. We initially made contact and agreed on a stock of 500m of recycled flooring from south Auckland, but on the day of checking the stock, we found out that the boards were in terrible shape, with loads of tongue damaged and holes. We were very disappointed (as we had organized delivery the same week). Seb rushed to another yard he had identified in Helensville (45km north, so close to 80km to were he was!). There, the friendly guy showed him what he had. “Yep, that’s our flooring there!” All their boards are made of recycled joists and beams, so they aren’t full of nail holes. Instead, they have the odd strange holes and defects that make it look very different…gives it character. Overall, a very good product, reconditioned to a good standard, and one that doesn’t initially require sanding! (saving $2000). The next day, the demolition guy and Seb had a great time sorting board by board and piling them for transport, which we managed to organize for the next day. After many phone calls and fine-tuning with Coromandel people for the last leg, the timber arrives safely on our land. Pfffiouu!

Waitangi week-end was spent laying our floorboards. Such hard work! In three days, we managed to do about half of the house, at the expense of 3 broken drill bits, a knocked finger, lots of swearing when the tongue didn’t want to go in the groove, and a 12-pack of beer under the hard sun. The result is an outstanding, and even our builder – usually unimpressed by our shenanigans – said we have done a good job. Good aye? We just another three days to go before it’s done but they then we should have our process down. Then, there are just a few more things to do…plumbing, gas fitting, wiring, bathroom, kitchen, jib, skirtings, etc, etc, etc…

In the meantime, the house will be finished outside. Before the end of February, we should have our verandah finished, waste water pipes in the ground, and the site cleared up!

To be continued…

We built a shed!

Well, sorta kinda. Almost.

We had a three day weekend (happy birthday to the Queen) and so we skipped out of work early on Friday, spent two hours packing up the truck and trailer, and then headed off to the Coromandel. The traffic wasn’t horrendous thankfully and we arrived in time to make dinner in the dark and then head off to bed. The next morning we woke early to begin our task. A couple of weekends ago we had set the posts for the shed in concrete so they were well set by now and we began our morning with hot bowls of porridge and humming and hawing around the posts. It was all very exciting. Then after the last drop of coffee was drunk we got to work.

We cut and measured and attached beams all around, then across, then filling in the spots that needed more beams. There were a lot of beams. After the beaming was done we started on the roof. Seb bought loads of corrugated iron for the roof and this came in handy right about now. We had two perfectly sized pieces and the rest were too short. Awesome. So while the first two went on quickly, the remaining 854 pieces (actually it was more like 20) had to have little pieces cut up for them to fit properly. By the end of the day (just in time for an apero) we had finished the roof. We celebrated with a delicious bowl of scrambled frittata (don’t ask) and beer.

The next morning we woke to a glorious day which was great because the weather forecast was less than favourable. We spent the day doing framing and on this day we managed to get our first window into the shed (no thanks to my horrendous measuring skills which meant having to re-do some framing…it was a mistake!!!). Anyway, after that incident I refrained from measuring anymore. Damn metric system. With the first window done we were one a roll and we put the plywood on the wall to make it look all homey. The neighbors had come to visit us the previous day and invited us to dinner and hot shower (oh yeah baby!) and so we packed it up early and set off to their place. We had an awesomely hot shower and a delicious dinner with a couple of the neighbors and then crawled back to our place with a little too much wine making our heads spin.

Needless to say we both woke up with headaches the following day. Headaches and power tools are not a good combination and Seb made it half way through the day of hammering and drilling before I sent him back to the neighbors for head-ache fixer. After that we were back on track. We managed to get the second window in and cover the back and side wall with corrugated iron before the sun set on us again. We were disappointed that we couldn’t finish the work but pretty thrilled that we had managed to get so much done in three days! The shed looks amazing and slightly unfinished but we’ll fix it right up next weekend. That’s what weekends are for!

Check out the shed building photos…now!