More outdoor goodness..

We had a cracker weekend here in terms of weather, so we made the most of it and got out in the garden. Something I had been meaning to do for a long time was tidy up the path round the back of the house...it was covered with about twenty years of leaf mulch and dirt, but somewhere underneath it all lay a neat brick path.


So although I had intended to do it myself, my mum couldn't hold herself back and got stuck into it with gusto on Saturday. The end result?




A path! This side of the house is all dark and cold and gets absolutely no sun at all so I am thinking of planting a wee fernery along the wall. See that ivy on the right? Evil evil stuff. So invasive and clingy and overpowering. There are actually full grown trees underneath that ivy.. being strangled and suffering a slow and no doubt painful death. We abhor ivy. It is the devil's plant.

Anyway, enough of the anti-ivy campaign. A few weeks ago, we tidied up the small garden bed outside the kitchen window...it was a bit of a mess but had potential..


Matt hauled away most of the big boulders (a couple were too big for his wee muscles so he left them sitting in the middle of the courtyard), and I dug some compost through the soil.

I planted a herb garden (rosemary, thyme, tarragon, sorrel, chives and parsley) and also about a dozen little lettuces for summer salads.


I am really hankering for a proper vege garden with real veges like potatoes and pumpkins, but for now this will have to do.

Matt's five cents...

We spend a fair bit of time talking about the things that are wrong with the house, but there's a lot that's right. By 1968 Warren & Mahoney really had it going on. They were no doubt the best architects in New Zealand and their style was unmistakable and often copied.

What made them so good? Huge talent and attention to detail.

Stark white blockwork walls, off form concrete fireplace mantel and exposed chimney flue.

Tongue and groove ceilings seem to float above the walls. Unusually the ceiling has no cavity - these are the floorboards of the second storey.

In a country in love with wool carpet and soft furnishings; quarry tiles and no curtains would have been pretty rad at the time.

All the doors are custom, made from rimu timber with brass fittings. There's 10 in total.

More pics to come.

Blocked drain funtimes...

This is our bath. The tiles are back to looking yucky as I am too scared to clean them, what with the general leakiness of them now. We are waiting on a quote to get the bathroom re-tiled, so until then why spend time cleaning something that is only going to get replaced? Cleaning shmeaning I say.


Anyway, see that plunger there? Well, the drain has been kind of blocked since we moved in - years and years of scum and dead hair - eeewwww...


I have been trying to unblock the drain using the plunger, but it only makes a temporary improvement. When the drainlayers were here last week, they suggested a new method.


Okay, I have gone all Perez on you with photoshop here...that white line is the line of the drain from the bath down to the outside. The plan goes like this...shove a hose up the drain from the bottom, about 20cm in, then seal off the drain using some old rags:


Turn the hose on full bore, leave for a minute (while holding tight to the rags as the pressure builds up), then release:


I did this about 3-4 times, and each time big chunks of this gross black jelly kind of gunk came out. The pressure felt really high. However, when I checked in the bathroom (I half expected huge hair balls to be splattered on the walls from the force of the water), the water hadn't even managed to come up as far as the bath....presumably there is more in there.....eew eew eeewwww!

The water was freezing, and the drain seems to work way better now, so I am not going to do it again for a while.

On another note - that tree right in front of the drain? The one with the flowers? That's a pear tree.


I really like it - the flowers are pretty, and it had pears on it in Autumn (I didn't eat any, but they looked nice). On the downside, it has huge spikes coming out of the branches that can cause serious injury if you are silly enough to get speared by one.


Anyway, Matt thinks it's ugly and reckons it has to go. Chop chop chop. I'm quite fond of it. What do you reckon? Stay or go?

Before and After - the dining area

I don't know why I didn't post this much much earlier. I think it is because it has taken ages to get an even half decent photo of this space - it is so dark for a large part of the year, which makes photography difficult. Yet we spend so much time here.

It's the dining area...here are a couple of before photos (nb for those of you that haven't been with us from the beginning - all of the 'before' photos were taken when the house was tenanted. This is not our furniture, nor our dodgy wall decorations, nor our messy bookshelves).



Needless to say, regardless of the general filth which is impossible to appreciate from these photos, the place looked fairly cluttered and generally icky. After we moved in, the place looked like this:


..which doesn't seem too bad until you see that the walls aren't white, they're just filthy cream..here's the white paint going on:


Then, about five months later:


I know this photo isn't exactly pimping, but it really is very hard. I think Matt is going to take a few really good shots of all of the interior at some point, but this will have to do until then.

New Sewer! - postscript

I forgot to mention the casualties which occurred on Saturday - there were two.

Firstly, the power cable supplying our garage got sliced through by a shovel. Luckily no-one got electrocuted. I have an electrician coming tomorrow to fix it.

And secondly, my father got smacked in the head with a long metal crowbar and was apparently laid out for a while. There was some blood, but he continued working without complaint. I forgot to take a photo.

In light this and the chainsaw incident, not to mention the fact that he was wielding the shovel mentioned above, I feel we will have to increase supervision when dad is helping out.

New Sewer!

Not sure if that title really deserves an exclamation mark, but hey...

A few weeks back Matt and our dads (his and mine) started digging up the old sewer pipes in preparation for replacement.



My husband, the working man.


Boo, the supervisory dog.

Then last Saturday the Pooman came up (seriously, that's what his company is called) to lay the drains. We made a deal that we would do all the digging and contribute to the hard labour in order to save us time. They would do the tricky stuff themselves like jack-hammering the pesky rock that got in our way and laying the pipes.


For half a day there were old men, young men and shirtless men hard at work outside (ladies remained indoors out of the heat and noise...of course).


Burrowes showed up. And ate some cake.


Then somehow got roped in to being chief concrete layer...


Six hot, sweaty hours later, we had a brand new sewer!


Ta da! Now we just have to cover it up again..

(nb, thank you to everyone who came up, including my mum, Alistair and the Browns...sorry I didn't get any photographic evidence of you being there, we couldn't have done it without you).

A bit more on the topic....

There was an interview with Sir Miles Warren (who designed our little house) and Maurice Mahoney on National Radio last week - chatting about the earthquake....in case you missed it, you can listen to it here.

My favourite part? That Maurice Mahoney's wife took him to the Crowne Plaza to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversay.