A sparkling knoll on Great Barrier Island So much has happened in our wee bubble since my last post that this one centres on new home sweet home. There’ll be a wider scope next time, though it can’t be too wide on an island less than 10 km across and perhaps two dozen long. We’re in at last – fourteen months after our first approach to Winnie and Charlie with an offer on the section! Nothing much happened until May this year, but once we had the Sale & Purchase Agreement in hand, we’ve been in the thick of it! Now that we’re actually living here it’s like a honeymoon, with all the planning, designing, consulting, ordering, paying, contacting, scheduling and – mainly – making hundreds of decisions all behind us, and just being here in the house that about 25 people played a part in creating! That’s about one in every 35 people who live on the island. Building a house is a great way to meet people! The build winds down.... Scotty nails in the architraves. Our lovely painting team. They’re specialised – Glenn wields the roller and Taanz cuts in! The time capsule in place. Ro insulated the storeroom, so only we know it’s there! The bedroom end. The opening at the far end is for a closet-to-be opening from the bathroom. The kitchen end The painted house has long lost its empty, tranquil Zen look! Scotty begins the decking The finished deck And of course, the septic system! Rory and the digger dig the hole. Rory’s father, Roger, measures the depth. Roger gave us the return trip of the digger ($135) as a housewarming present. In goes the tank. Roger's on the left. Septic line to the tank Trevor the drain layer with Rory on the digger Lance, the building inspector (in grey shirt), here to give his seal of approval to the proceedings. Lance and a small team of other firefighters from the Barrier periodically travel overseas to assist with the miserable, dangerous job of trying to put out rampaging forest fires. A few months ago they were in Vancouver for six weeks. All these people, machinery and cost for little old us to use a toilet! Oh, for the sanity and simplicity of cabin days. with a surface privy we cleaned out and composted twice a year. These days compliance is the name of the game and there’s not much choice in most aspects of building (and many other things!). Grateful for the help of good people – plenty of that on this project! Stu is (was!) our neighbour on Oceanview Road, living for decades in the closest house to the beach. He just happens to be a master cabinetmaker with time to make our kitchen. What luck! Here he is in his workshop, with one of the benches in progress. Cousins Blue and Jordan helped move the kitchen from Stu’s into the house. Jordan helped us every morning in the week leading up to the move, bringing stuff to the house, assembling flatpacks and being generally the most helpful, careful, skilful, delightful, caring, lovely guy. Here he is starting to put together a bedside table. Jordan, we love you! So here we are, in a wee house on a wee section that we’ve christened Sparkle Knoll. The saga of our stuff You may recall photos from June 2016 when two GBI friends combined a wee tour of South Island with emptying our space at Golden Bay Storage collecting some large items that dear Purple kept safe, and bringing it all to our superlative, superb, supreme superhero friend Ashna in Turua, south of Thames. Then, slowly but very surely, Ashna blended skilful magic and a massive dose of kindhearted friendship, bringing to fruition a plan to reunite us with everything we’ll need to set up our new house. When we ventured into the great Barrier unknown in March 2015, we only brought what fit into Tweety, the yellow car. Ashna found a truckbox and a trailer on TradeMe, both well past their best-by dates, and bit by bit transformed a pair of sow’s ears into two functional more-or-less silk purses. He repaired them, lined the truckbox and even put in a slider, two windows and a light! Thanks to Ashna, we have an all-in-one moving van, portable storage space and sleepout on or off its wheels! At $225 per cubic metre, getting freight over to the Barrier is very expensive, and it’s also expensive to have the cartage guys bring big stuff to you from the wharf. Anyone building here or fitting out a place knows what a toll that added cost can take! With glee we bypassed Freightlink and cartage by having shipped to Ashna many of the items we bought for the house, which he put into the truckbox for “free” passage on the barge – kitchen bench, light fixtures, shelves, a table and chairs for the deck, some “flatpacks” (never knew of flatpacks before) like bedside tables, bookcases and kitchen drawer cabinets, even a fridge and a case of toilet paper made from recycled sugarcane and renewable bamboo! With everything loaded, locked and hitched up to his friend’s ute, Ashna set his clock for 4 am and set out for the wharf at Wynyard Quarter, Auckland, to drive the rig onto the boat and then head home, a several-years’ mission well and truly accomplished. At midday we were on our way to the wharf at Tryphena with a friend in his friend’s grunty SUV. The ferry came into view! We’d soon be reunited with our long-lost stuff! It arrived at the wharf! At last we set eyes upon the prize – a moment we’d envisioned for a very long time. The crew towed it off the boat, where it was unhitched and rehitched, and the three of us relaxed and celebrated with a yummy picnic! The journey home took twice as long pulling the laden load, and then – we unlocked the door to renew our acquaintance with our worldly possessions and to finally see exactly what everything we bought online looks like in 3D! Birds, bees and blossoms One day checking for mail at Pigeon Post we ran into a beekeeper friend. He asked if we had time to see “something amazing”. We said we always have time for something amazing! What could it be? We followed him to his place, where we stopped at one of his apiaries. These bees are fanning to keep the hive from getting too hot. These bees are building up comb on the underside of the top board. And these are filling drawn comb with nectar. Bees certainly are amazing, but this wasn’t the main event. Neither were these manuka blossoms, which have a story of amazement of their own. Bees use their long tubelike tongues to suck tiny bits of nectar out of depths of the wee flowers and into their stomachs, where they store it until they finally return to the hive with a full load, after visiting hundreds of flowers. While inside the bee's stomach the nectar mixes with the proteins and enzymes and is converted into honey. The bees then drop the honey into the beeswax comb and fan their wings over the cells to evaporate and thicken the honey. Finally they cap the honeycomb with wax and move on to the next empty comb. Our friend loves his geese, ducks and guinea fowl as much as his bees and blossoms, but neither were these the main event. Our friend's “something amazing” was also part of the natural world, something short lived, about one week a year. It’s the small but spectacular grevillea trees he planted on a vast hillside! To everything there is a season Our visit was a month ago, and as spring merged into summer, the manuka blossoms faded and now dots and swaths of white kanuka blossoms grace the island. More Barrier beauty An 8 pm double rainbow from the deck of our rental Tapuwai Point, north end of Whangapoua Beach, North Barrier (not my photo) Tryhena sunset (not my photo)
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