Our own home in NZ!

Five years of not living in a house that you own can drive you slightly nuts! Five years of having to watch your kids like hawks when they want to paint, use play dough or do anything slightly messy can lead to very fraught nerves and high blood pressure. Five years of trying to hide that melted crayon in the carpet every time you have a house inspection by the letting agents can get very trying.

So we finally took the plunge and have brought our own home in the land of the long white cloud.

We loved the little suburb we rented in and tried to find a property in that area but after a grand total of two weeks (yep we have no patience) we decided to widen the search and ended up in a suburb 10 minutes away but, most importantly, within walking distance of the sea!

Our new home is nestled amongst the trees and stands on long wooden pylon's that look quite frightening to someone who grew up in the brick semis so common in the UK.

We discovered our new adventure. We have brought a house that won an architectural design award when it was built way back in 1977 and now is in need of a bit of TLC. It is structurally sound, as our structural engineer and builder have confirmed, but it is a wooden house and needs some attention and probably a new roof in the near future. It also has some interesting 70s design features which although I may grow to love, may need to be updated slightly so that I can happily live with them.

It is surrounded by woodland and as my grandad has said, is essentially a "Shed in a Wood". Hence the blog name! So this will be a chronical of our attempts to make our new family home in our architecturally designed Shed in a Wood.

During the four weeks we have been in our new home my kids have already made it feel theirs. When asked to stop using felt pens near the lounge carpet they responded "Its alright Mummy, its our carpet now, it doesn't matter if we get pen on it"! Not quite my point!