For any house-dreamer, the term building consent gives a chill from head to toe straight away. We were not different than others. The perspective of getting into this battle with council – hereafter named ‘the Devil’ – impacted on our choice of a local architect and on some of design decisions. In the last months we heard stories of long, painful and costly processes of getting a permit for any kind of building. But that was mainly in town, where it seems to be crazy. On our side, we were lucky not to have to build in a small section subdivision, where an army of experts have to determine where you put your house, your fence, your driveway, your sewage pipes and your mother-in-law. In our case, when the limits of your lot are hundreds of meters away, it was easier.

With our architect, we worked to be able to present plans as fast as we could in order to deal with the unavoidable issues that were due to arise. It took a month to draft plans and make little adjustments. As our architect mentioned, we were very lucky to ask for this consent now, because the law on windows is due to change in October. From that date, all new dwellings will have to have double glazing windows. A rule that would condemn all our great restored timber windows to the fires of hell! Ouuuf, that was lucky!

On the 30^th of May, our architect had the first meeting with the Devil. It seems all went well with the plans, but in the back of our minds we thought it was too easy. The Devil found an odd expertise that could slow our process, gnark gnark! Which one? Well…on how we are going to spread our s..t in the bush basically. So, there we go, 2 weeks and $1600 later, we had to provide them with a report on where the wastewater dripping lines will be lined up in the bush…and so the building consent process began. Tic tac tic tac.

The wait continued. A week later, a letter arrived with serious issues to sort on our plans, involving a scary mix of letters and figures (NZ1034?), basically meaning some of our timber was not big enough on the deck – or some similar thing. Luckily, our architect defeated the Devil and sent some corrected plans without the use of a crucifix or blessed water. What would be next?

Another week later, the Devil – mimicking a woman’s voice over the phone – thought he would strike and take our souls away. But we were prepared and provided clues on how we would respect the QEII Trust’ covenant with regard to colours of roof, walls and windows. Ah ah, good try Lucifer!

In the meantime, we found out that our application could be followed up on the Devil’s website (www.tcdc.govt.nz). So all strikes and blows could be foreseen before the letters even arrived! Was that another trick to distract our attention and attack from the side?

Eventually, 5 weeks after the application, exhausted by nights of watching our backs – and sides – we received the letter with the invoice. After a check for poison on the paper, it seems we have our consent!

Thanks to all the saints – and our architect – for that good news!

But it’s not finished. At building stage, we will have to call for Lucifer’s messengers 10 times on site to check on us. We’ll be ready and waiting!

We’re getting all fancy now. We’re the talk of the town.

We have our very own tipi!

A while ago we thought it would be great to have a tipi on the land as a sleep-out. As it turns out our architect had one is his backyard when we went to visit him one day and it was then that we decided we should get one to stay in while we are waiting for the house to be built.

We contacted the same people who built our architect’s tipi, Jaia Tipis and they had a 5-meter one in stock, ready to send to us. We were so excited…like a couple of kids waiting for Christmas, crazy with anticipation.

And then finally, it arrived from Golden Bay!

We drove to the Freight depot on a Friday night after work and were astounded to see the size of the poles. They were enormous! Thankfully we had the trailer on the back of the truck as the poles reached midway across the trailer. And I think we were also very lucky not to get pulled over. The tipi gods were smiling on us.

By the time we got to the land it was very late and the weather was looking a bit dodgy so we covered the area where the tipi was going to with a large tarpaulin and went to sleep. We didn’t actually get much sleep though because the wind kept trying to take the tarpaulin away. In the morning the day turned glorious and we began the task of putting up the tipi.

We laid out our poles and admired the craftsmanship. Then we started reading the instructions and were hopeful we’d have the tipi up in a few hours. Five hours later, our tipi was erected.

Seb uttered a phrase his dad had told him on more than one occasion. “Doing and re-doing is still work.” We did a lot of re-doing…the magic number was three times for each re-do. Somehow our relationship remained intact and once the tipi was up we were both happy and all of the re-dos and mistakes were forgotten (well, mostly).

With the sun setting we started putting our items in the tipi. We used pallets as a base for the mattress and spread carpets over the tarpaulin that was now our floor. We put the little pot-belly stove in and started a fire. It was super cozy! Once everything was in we had a celebratory glass of wine with some Coromandel oysters and then I cooked my first dinner on the wood burner…a vege frittata.

As we were going to bed we could hear a storm brewing outside. It only got worse as the night went on and we spent another sleepless night wondering if our tipi would be blown away. We wondered if we should have gotten a caravan instead. Unlike sleeping in the truck, we could hear every single sound in the bush. We thought there were mice in the tipi. We thought the possums were just outside. I thought they might eat us if they were hungry enough and I remembered that story that one of the contractors told me about possums running up onto people’s heads.

As it turns out our tipi was still standing the next morning and the possums didn’t eat us. Only a tiny bit of rain got in and dripped on my head thanks to the rain catcher. I spent the next day wind-proofing the tipi, taking everything out and re-doing the floor. The next storm we go through in it should be much better and we might even get some sleep…

Seb’s been doing a lot of writing here lately so I am jumping in in between the French homework I should be doing with the laundry whizzing around behind me like a jet engine and I’ll talk about something we did this past weekend.

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!