Our swanky London flat

I've had requests to blog some images of our barn conversion. Apologies for the delay.. Part of me wanted to wait until we were in - which since Christmas I've constantly thought was going to be in about 3 or 4 days time! We're converting the barn as somewhere to live until we build the house. Anyway, we decided to do things properly, so we are essentially building a proper flat within the barn, and that means everything takes longer. Steven has done the whole conversion himself - I thought I was a perfectionist! When I help I can almost feel him worrying that I won't continue the STRAIGHT LINE.

Even though I say this every week and no one is going to believe me anymore - we will actually be moving in next Sunday. WOOHOO! There's only a few hundred more little things to do in the meantime. Sometimes I find myself daydreaming that its all magically finished and we can move in tonight. Here are my most popular daydreams at the moment:

1) We win the lottery, and pay a team of the fastest tradesmen around to finish the barn for us. Then we holiday in Hawaii for a bit.
2) We actually do the work ourselves, although I have a magical remote control that fastforwards to me sitting in the barn watching a good film with a large slab of chocolate thinking "I'm glad THATS all over".
3) We are nominated to be on one of those television programmes where Very Good People get rewarded for their good deeds by having their house built for them. Overnight. Only I'm not sure donating to charity by direct debit every month would qualify us.

Here are the photos!

Space for a double door and an upstairs window at the front:



Our new gravel driveway!





The upstairs is a mezzanine area, typical of a £300,000 flat in London! Only this is costing us a little less..



Weather boarding the outside:



This day Steven was doing the outside walls and I was doing the insulation on the inside:





A self portrait:



And a demonstration of how you insert the pink batts insulation into the walls:







That last one is Donna of course looking after her chicks. Its so cute watching them copy what she does. We only have 4 chicks now since Nana killed one (Nana the dog that is). She has a dark side to her that one. The only problem is she looks so cute and mournful on the naughty chain.

Animal farm!

Here are some photographs detailing the latest happenings at our place. We're going to move into the barn this weekend - woohoo! Conversion into something liveable has taken a while since we're essentially building a flat from scratch. Laying the concrete floor took ages, we could only start work in the evenings when Steven got home from work, and we're not, you know, complete experts... The animals weren't too helpful, I managed to match up these wet concrete footprints to a certain rooster... He's looking more and more tasty by the day (joking!)





A couple more photos of our lovely dogs. Nana always looks like she's done something wrong. When its more likely to be her brother- who spends a lot of time on the naughty chain.



"Nails, have you done something wrong?"
"Me? definitely not..."



laying the concrete floor - SO boring. But hopefully worth it.





Down at the river during a very hot spell.








Collecting our furniture from Christchurch. We hired a big lorry which Steven drove. He thought he was very cool, signalling to the other lorry drivers with all the fancy lights on the front. We packed up the furniture, and I kid you not, there was not an inch of space left in the back. We were so lucky to get it all in! The dogs came with us and rode in the cab. They slept most of the way, although Nana likes to look where she's going through the front window. Nails keeps his head down and looks mildly annoyed if you go through a corner at any speed.





We came home to find that 5 of Donna's eggs had successfully hatched! We have 4 yellow chicks and one black one. I can't wait to see how they'll turn out. She led them all down the ramp to the grass at the back of the coop where she shows them how to peck, and keeps them warm in her feathers.



This one was all sleepy:







Thats all for now. I need to go and stare at the chicks again - my new hobby!

Sitting in the clouds

It turns out the land we are building on is in a cloud forest. How cool is that? In the evening after a rainy day the clouds settle and disperse over the hills and it looks amazing. At the moment it is quite mild so you can just stand outside and breathe in the atmosphere. This is Steven enjoying the view:





(those are our barn poles waiting to go up in the foreground). And this is my lovely husband:



We've started a new fence that stretches across the top part of the land. The idea is that it marks a boundary between our house area and then other/farm area below. You can just see the fence posts in the image below. Rhys from next door put them in using his tractor, with Steven's help. Infact you can assume from now on that any tricky farm type work that takes place on the land has been done by Rhys. Even if you thought that it was me who put all those fence posts in...



Okay this is slightly freaky. I'm new to owning chickens, and our chickens seem perfectly normal and healthy in most respects, but surely all chickens are not this needy. This is what happens with ours - I feed them (in their coop) in the morning, then they peck about a bit, I go inside the tent... and they stand outside. For as long as I'm in there. And they don't just stand around - they STARE at me. All day. Is this normal? Sometimes I look around and they pretend to be cleaning themselves. Otherwise they just stand there.. and stare in:



Shooing them away or throwing things at them doesn't work because they just pop right back - they don't seem to learn like dogs or cats. Oh and the other day it was pouring with rain, and rather than go and hang out in their coop, they stood outside staring at me IN THE RAIN! They were soaked through. I felt guilty which was silly because they are there of their own free will!

Very odd. When I'm gone they behave like normal chickens and peck about at things. And I probably need to point out that I'm gone most of the day doing things.

Last weekend we hired a rotary hoe to dig our vegetable garden. I assumed as a machine I would simply stand back and let it do all the work. Its the 21st century after all! Unfortunately that wasn't the case and you need arms of steel to operate the hoe for more than about 10 minutes. Which was as long as I lasted. Luckily Steven came to my rescue (after a morning of pouring concrete into the barn pole holes), and he spent the next 3 hours rotary hoeing our veg patch. I was on hand with my camera to record things. Oh, thats Steven in the far distance doing all the work. And on my head there you can see my makeshift cap. It was soooo sunny on Saturday.



This morning I made up for my lack of work on Saturday - I had to empty the barn pole holes (that the giant corkscrew made) of all the rain that had filled them up over the last few days before the council inspector arrived. Steven has a new job in town. I tied some rope to a bucket and hauled out the water and did that for about 3 hours. There are 17 barn holes and each hole contained about 10 bucket loads. Ow! luckily we passed the inspection, possibly because I looked so bedraggled by the time the inspector arrived.

I'll leave you with a photograph of Steven looking out over the sea at the peninsula on Sunday. Its either pouring with rain, stormy or very very sunny here!

House News...

Well its been an eventful old week here on the land. You'll have to imagine I'm typing outside the tent though because I'm actually in an internet cafe in Dunedin surrounded by fellow nerds on a really beautiful sunny day.

Last week our friends Conrad and Sue gave us our first farm animals - a rooster and 2 hens. This was especially generous of them since these are prime chickens apparently, from good stock. Which panicked us slightly when we left them in their temporary cage for a few hours and got home to find they had all escaped. All three. It was late and there was a storm brewing. So we spent the evening chasing chickens from our land to Bruce the neighbour's land, and back to ours, and back to his. It may have appeared funny to the casual observer but we weren't impressed. One hen got herself into a large thorny bush and stayed there. The other we caught, and the rooster obviously thought it was hilarious and just kept running. We got them all back in the end, thankfully, and now they go to bed quite happily in a lovely chicken coop that we built all by ourselves. During the day all three chickens follow Steven about pecking happily. Whenever he turns around they all look up expentantly.

Oh, and we named them. The rooster is called Hussein, after Hussein Bolt the star athlete. The ladies are Mavis and Donna. Mavis seems to be in charge, which is funny because she is the most stupid. Often the way though with leaders ey? I'm trying to get them to have baby chickens, so we need to get Hussein in the mood. I played him some Barry White on the ipod and he seemed to like that, so we'll see how it goes.

Our barn has been delivered! And this week Wayne the digger man showed up to dig the platform for the barn and push a gigantic cork screw into the platform to make big holes for the barn posts (you'll notice I'm learning the technical jargon as I go along here). The cork screw thing was great so I took a video of it which I will post on here. We've also had gravel delivered for the foundations. It won't be long before we have a barn to stay in! With 4 solid walls that don't threaten to collapse in the wind! And electricity!!!! Phew, its all a bit much. Steven 'phoned the man at Delta electricity to find out why it's taking so long. They're a relaxed bunch at Delta. "As long as you have it before Christmas ey?" said the cheery (and very relaxed) man on the phone. CHRISTMAS??!!! I tell you what, if we don't have electricity pretty soon I am putting Steven, Hussein, Mavis, Donna and probably Tasty and Tasty Junior the goats in the car and heading over to the Delta man's house to enjoy his electricity for a bit.

I jest though, its a pain sometimes not having power but also kind of cool. (We will have alternative power up at some point in the future but we decided we needed to hook up to the grid for the meantime.) We have the gas lamp on in the evenings and it feels great to be on the land - our own land! I like to imagine myself as a hardened early New Zealand pioneer, eeking out my existence on the unforgiving land....only with nicer clothes... and decent moisturiser... and access to a supermarket - but you get the idea.

Weather-wise its been pretty turbulant. Going from hot and sunny to... snowing.



Bruce and Rhys (I'll spell it the welsh way until I'm told otherwise!) our neighbours helping with marking out the barn poles:



Wayne moves a bit of grass for us (thats the trench for the phone):



The Morganty boys help us with the new chickens:




Making the chicken coop in a blizzard (fun). Thats our toilet and showering facilities on the right there:




Hussein:




Donna:




Mavis:




The coop! They know its home now and pop up to bed when it gets dark.




Freedom!




Tasty and Junior sharing a moment:




We now have cows down the edge of the land to eat away the broom and gorse. Here is Steven attempting to feed a very uninterested Horny the bull (not our name for him).



So, things are moving on - I can't believe it's the middle of November already! I have a fence for my vegetable garden but no vegetable seeds, so I must go and order some...