Airports, earthquakes, and plants.

Well, it has been a few weeks since I promised some more house pictures so here they finally are. Life has been rather busy lately. Ted and I have both been traveling quite a bit for work. My companies (OMV) main office is in Wellington but we also have a small office in New Plymouth, which is a 1 hour flight from Wellington and is the base for our offshore facility. I have spent at least two days a week there for the last month and will be there at least once a week until mid-October. Ted was in the Philippines for work at the beginning of August, is currently doing field work in Taupo (about 4 hours drive away, I know because I drove up to visit this weekend) and he leaves for Egypt in about a week and a half. So, we see lots of airports these days and are both getting rather tired of traveling. I can almost recite the Air New Zealand pre-flight safety briefing. I guess we are getting lots of airmiles though which is good.

I was in New Plymouth when I felt my first big earthquake earlier this week. It didn't last long and wasn't really that big but I did feel two good shakes with steady movement in between, it probably lasted a total of 25 seconds, not even long enough to get nervous or think about going for cover. It turns out there was a 5.1 ~ 100 km away from New Plymouth.

Our new house has a is surrounded by a large garden with many plants we do not recognize. A few weekends ago we looked at the garden and realized it had changed from when we got here, the ferns were significantly larger and seemed to be blocking out a lot of other "stuff". So, we decided it was time to try "gardening", only, neither one of us knew what that meant. I remembered weeding when I was little but as we don't recognize the plants, we have difficulty distinguishing weeds from plants we want. We also remembered trimming things with clippers, so, we headed to the garden store to get some gardening gloves and clippers. We got home and started wandering around the house trying to figure out what to cut. We did figure out how to trim some of the bushes, Ted working to make perfect right angles and flat planes. We could not, however, decide whether the ferns truly were weeds or just needed to be trimmed back. We decided to trim them, rather than pull them out, as they did seem to be planted in specific locations. It turns out that was a good idea, someone told us they are quite expensive to buy, phew. I think we need to buy a book on gardening in New Zealand.

Now for the house photos....



This is the view from the deck in the backyard, you can even see snow on the mountains in the distance. The deck that I was standing on to take this picture will be our first improvement project next summer since the house inspector said we shouldn't use it.


This is our living room, it is really nice to have our furniture back.


Here is the dinning room, Ted is working on setting up our internet.


Here is our bedroom, note the boxes we are using as furniture, the hot water bottle on the floor in front of the end table and in the lower left corner you can see the space heater. When we first got here I noticed that a lot of stores were selling hot water bottles, which I didn't understand. I had used a hot water bottle when I was little and couldn't sleep, but I couldn't figure out why they were so popular here. It wasn't until our first night in the house when we went to bed and found our sheets absolutely freezing. So, now we heat up the bed with the hot water bottle.

Here is our crazy closet, we spent a lot of our first few weeks in the house getting this organized but it is definitely worth it now. This room is actually bigger than the small bedroom but it is connected to our bedroom and can't really be used for anything other than a closet, so, a giant closet it is.

Here is the garage. Ted is very excited to have a place to store and work on the bikes. We have been out for a few rides. From where we live we can be on rails in less than 10 minutes, there is a lot of uphill to get there though. We just got our roof racks set up on the new car so now we can explore some of the biking areas that are a bit far to bike to.

Here is the side deck, which is nicely sheltered from the wind. We bought this half wine barrel to use as a planter, now we just have to figure out what to plant in it.

Here is the music room. We got the piano working last month so next we need to get an Amp so that Ted can play his guitar.

Here is the computer room/office/extra spare sleeping space. So far though it is more of a storage room.

And last, we have the spare room, don't worry we do plan to buy furniture.

Well, that is it. We definitely need some more furniture but the main living areas are pretty much set up. Now we just have to be home long enough to enjoy it.

We hope you are all doing well.

We own a piece of New Zealand - the big move

Well, here I am, sitting on OUR couch in OUR house in Wellington New Zealand. Wow, it does feel pretty nice to own a house but even after 4 weeks I still don't think it has fully set in.

We got the house on July 2nd and our stuff was scheduled to arrive on the 3rd, so we camped out in the empty house the night of the 2nd.



We woke the next morning to a gorgeous sunny day, which is rare in Wellington winters, usually it is raining and cold. The movers arrived late, but to our relief did eventually show up. The road our house is on is so narrow they blocked the whole street with their truck. Not the best way to make friends with your neighboors but it turned out none of them needed to get out anyway so it was ok.



They gave Ted a clip board so that he could keep track of everything coming off the truck, so he stayed out in the driveway while I helped carry things inside. It was rather impressive, how they were able to pack everything in so tightly and kind of scary watching them try to take it off the truck without a ladder, they didn't drop anything though.



Unpacking all of our boxes was like a really big Christmas. Everything had been packed up for almost 5 months so we had forgotten about a lot of things.

We took two weeks off work in order to unpack and organize the house. We had figured we would be mostly finished with the house after the first week and spend the second week relaxing and exploring our neighborhood... right! We spent most of the first week just unpacking and beginning to organize and the second week building shelves and hanging pictures. We were pretty well set-up by the end of our vacation though.

During those 2 weeks we got to know the local hardware store quite well, buying shelving and other things needed to get ourselves organized. The chain is called Mitre 10. They have both small local stores and then a few large stores they call Mitre 10 Mega. The Mitre 10 Mega is similar to a home depot.

Ted, who is very excited to have his own garage, decided that said garage needed some good shelving. We found what he wanted at... Mitre 10 Mega.

Here is Ted before the assembly started, looking excited to build his first garage shelf, note the vacation beard.



Here he is reading the directions.



Once the directions were understood it was time for assembly.



Then a decision was made that the shelf was going to be too high, so modifications were required. Unlike in our old apartment at least these modifications didn't have to take place in the kitchen, it is nice to have a garage.



Then, with a bit more assembly, the shelf was ready to hold stuff.



It was really good to have two full weeks off and we actually had some really good weather. By the end of the vacation we had the main living area, our bedroom, and of course the garage, fully "sorted". I will post some photos of the house with all our stuff in it soon.

Hope you are all doing well.
Meg and Ted