Cold

It's been cold this week. We haven't seen snow in our area of Wellington, but it has covered some of the surrounding hills. I think we are just too near the coast for any of the white stuff to settle near here.

It has been bitterly cold though and I have been a  bit worried about our outdoor Guinea Pigs. Errol is over five years old, which is getting on a bit in Guinea Pig terms. He is well over pensionable age! So I have stuffed their hutches with hay and insulated them with cardboard and newspaper. They seem to be coping alright at the moment. 

I will start giving them hot water bottles when the temperature starts hitting minus numbers at night.

I have said many times before on these pages that New Zealand houses aren't really designed for winter weather. There is something in the Kiwi psychology that makes them unable to admit that it can get a bit chilly during the winter here. So many blokes over here still insist on wearing shorts and t-shirts when the temperature is not even hitting double digits. Maybe its a male thing. But then the houses aren't designed for cold weather either. We have just been to Mitre 10 again to purchase another heater to try and keep the downstairs of our house warm in the evening. Like most houses over here we do not have central heating and the heat from our wood burning stove unfortunately does not travel down stairs.

My eldest bravely played netball in the freezing hail on Saturday morning and understandably lost that game 23-1. However in the afternoon game (once the sun had come out) she won 37-nil. The rest of the weekend has been spent buying winter coats and thermals.

I also had a cold walk along the seafront withe the dog and had a wander around the garden to see if there was anything still alive after the cold nights we have been having!

Wintery Reflections on a Sunday Morning

Its Mothers Day here in NZ. Its a good day to be a Mum. I have been thoroughly spoilt. Breakfast in bed and dinner out last night. It is also a gloriously sunny morning and sitting in bed eating my pancakes I thought it would be a good morning to take some photos.

It the kind of bright sunny morning that Wellington seems to be extremely good at. Unlike in the UK where you get days of grey wet cold and miserable weather, that seem to last interminably in winter. New Zealand will very rarely have more than one grey day at a time. Yesterday was cold wet and windy and today has awoken bright sunny and cheery.

My girls are busy tidying their rooms and my other half has given then instructions not to ask Mummy to do anything today as its my "special day". I think he is really raising the bar here, in preparation for Fathers Day. I have a while to prepare so I should be okay!

I decided to take advantage of some quiet time and took some photos of our beautiful new house in the sun.

I have lived in around fourteen or fifteen different houses in my lifetime and this house is my favourite. It is not the biggest or by any means in the best repair, but it is the cosiest, and the one that feels most like home.

My favourite room. I think it's all the light that streams in and all the wood which gives it the feeling of warmth.

My favourite spot in my favourite room. I can sit here and look out at the birds in the trees and have a good nose at anyone that happens to walk by.

For years and years we have wanted a wood burning stove and we have finally managed it. Central heating in NZ is very unusual. Unless you are a British expat and have it installed yourself. Most people over here seem to have heat pumps, little stand alone heaters or wood burners. We have a heat pump in this house but I don't like it. It's great if you are sitting directly underneath it, but otherwise fairly useless.

The wood burner can heat the whole house and the flames make you feel all warm and cosy just through visual effect alone. It is also smelly and dirty and will fill your house with smoke and dust (at least if you are as useless as lighting it as me!) but the whole rigmarole is worth it in the end once it is alight and glowing happily in your warm and cosy living room.

This is apparently my two girls tidying their rooms. I guess the floor is relatively clear so that's one achievement.

 

My eldest in her tidy-ish red room.

I like the way the kids bedrooms can easily extend onto the deck when the weather is good.

And when the winter sunshine penetrates the canopy the garden just looks magical.

Bedrooms and Tree Turkeys.

When we moved in we knew one of the first jobs we would tackle would be the children's bedrooms. Our house is designed on three levels, with bedrooms on the ground and second floor. The main living area is in between. This means that the bedrooms on the ground floor can be a bit dark.
So we decided to tackle these first and make sure they were nice cheery places for the kids to play.

Someone who previously lived in our house obviously liked the colour orange. A lot of the house is orange and blue. Interesting combination I think you'll agree. It made the ground floor appear even darker than it naturally is. So we decided white was a good way to go.

Being progressive parents and wanting to encourage our children's creativity and individuality, we allowed them to choose one colour for one wall in their rooms. The other three walls would be white. Well my youngest daughter chose "pea green". Okay it's not actually called that on the pot, it called something much more seductive like "spring meadow", but it is essential pea green. Lovely! We couldn't go back on our promise to allow them to choose, so we came back from Bunnings (NZ equivalent of B&Q) with a lovely pot of pea green paint!

Also rather riskily, we allowed the kids to help paint the rooms too!

Rather surprisingly once the "pea green" was put on the walls it actually looked rather nice.

My other half also got rather inspired and decided to paint a tree and what is apparently a bird of paradise in its branches. Me and the kids decided it looked more like a Turkey! However I think the end result has really cheered and brightened up the smallest bedroom.

The tale of the treehouse!

So our lovely new home came with an existing tree house built on top of an existing tree stump. It was covered with spiders and dead leaves and numerous insects so was not fully explored by us or the kids when we moved in. And most importantly it was not examined by our structural engineer.

About a week after we moved in our friends came round with their kids and three of the girls decided to be brave enough to climb up and explore the tree house. After the main cobwebs and dead leaves had been swept out by Mum.

The parents had withdrawn to the kitchen for a cuppa and chat when we heard what sounded like a tree collapsing. With our stomachs well and truly in our mouths we ran out to see what I fully expected to be a scene of carnage.

Well the tree house had completely toppled over and slid down the bank. The three girls had been inside when it fell. One of them had been thrown out and had was lying half way down the bank. My eldest emerged from the remains unscathed and my youngest had to be retrieved from the wreckage and sustained two bad knocks to the head.

Following a panicked trip to A & E thankfully no one was badly hurt. However a lesson was well and truly learnt that day. Do not let your kids climb tree houses without thoroughly examining their structural integrity first!

House Buying in New Zealand - Lessons learnt.

Buying a house in New Zealand is a bit of a different experience than buying in the UK.

I will not attempt to give you a complete guide to house buying in NZ (as I am no expert!) but will share our experience.

Firstly, and most importantly, it is a lot easier to be nosy and view far more houses than you can in the UK, thanks to the wonderful world of "Open Homes". On a Saturday or Sunday hopeful home sellers will allow their castles to be viewed by nosy neighbours and the odd genuine potential buyer. This is a brilliant idea as you can view many properties in an area that you are interested in and get a really good idea of whats available. It also means that you can view a property without being scrutinised by the anxious owners desperately trying to gauge whether you are genuinely interested or just come round for a bit of a jolly and a good old nose around!

The other confusing thing for us was the way in which houses are advertised. They are not all priced clearly. Some have "open to tender" which means that you can place a sealed bid on the property and the owner will accept the highest bid or the one with the best conditions. Others are advertised as "offers over" and you are open to offering an amount above the one stated. This is a silly idea as we found out when we offered the amount stated and were told they were looking for 30 thousand more. Well why not state that to start with!

Other properties go to Auction. We did not consider these as the whole idea of making a purchase for that amount of money on the spur of the moment just seemed a bit to scary for us. However other people I have spoken too have bought they houses through Auctions and apparently it is actually not that frightening on the day!

Once you have chosen your future dream home you can put in an offer (if it is advertised as "offers over") and you do this by contacting the Real Estate Agent advertising the property. They then take your offer to the owners and get back to you, much the same as in the UK.

With our property this involved a very anxious wait whilst at a 6 years old's birthday party and then having to sit on our hands for a few hours to prevent us ringing back immediately with our slightly higher offer. We did not want to seem too keen.

Once your offer has been accepted you then have to actually sign a conditional contract. This is obviously very different to the UK were you are free to drop out at any point if you change your mind on the purchase. In NZ you sign a contract stating you promise to buy the house providing certain conditions are met. Normally these conditions will include getting a LIM report done (the equivalent of a local authority search in the UK), a builders report and possibly an engineers report.

Unsurprisingly Kiwis have a very different and relatively relaxed approach to making the biggest purchase of their lives. Some friends I have spoken to did not bother getting a LIM report on their property, never mind a builders report! This horrified me as the thought of purchasing some of the wooden shacks and interestingly designed buildings around here (in an earthquake zone!) without getting them thoroughly checked seemed bizarre and mightily risky. However perhaps this more relaxed attitude it something I could do with occasionally.

We put a LIM report and builders report and an engineers report in our conditions. These are not cheap but as our house is somewhat unique and standing on very long poles we thought it would be a good idea to get it thoroughly checked.

All the reports came back okay. The builders report came back with a fairly long list of things highlighted in red (indicating they were things we really should consider carefully!). Luckily none of the things they highlighted were items that we hadn't already spotted as potential problems.

The Engineer thankfully said that the house was not going to go anywhere and that is had already been earthquake strengthened but the garage could probably do with a few extra strengthening struts. The very nice Engineer appeared to be in his sixties (every other one was currently in Christchurch working on the reconstruction) and very kindly climbed down a very dangerous slope to view underneath the house. I felt very guilt making this fragile looking man slide down a muddy slope on his bottom just to reassure me the house was not going to collapse in the near future.

Once all the conditions have been met you then sign a unconditional contract which if you back out of requires you to pay the owners your deposit in full. So do not sign this one unless you are absolutely certain this is the house you want.

Once you have decided on a date for completion and moving you will find that the estate agent will actually deliver the keys to you personally and usually with a gift of some sort! Estate agents make a lot of money over here and are therefore very grateful to the purchasers! When we complered our estate agent appeared on our doorstep with the keys and a big box done up with a beautiful bow. He had bought us a rather beautiful woolen blanket. A friend of ours recieved crystal glasses when they moved. Very surprising, but very welcome tradition!

So this was the house we wanted, despite the scary poles and dodgy looking roof. It is our shed in the wood and will hopefully be our family home for a long time to come. All we have to do now is put our own stamp on it. Give it the love and care it needs and bring it back to being the family home it once was.

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!

A Word of Warning for Expats renting out their property in the UK

Just under three years ago we moved to Belgium (before ending up in NZ) and started renting out our property in the UK. This was and still is our family home and we own no other property. We informed our mortgage company (Nationwide) and they said it was fine and would not affect our 10 year fixed rate mortgage. We received no notification that this would alter our mortgage in any way and had to sign no forms or any other correspondence.

We set up the appropriate letting insurance and everything else was organised by our letting agent. We assumed everything was fine and have been lucky enough to rent out our property fairly continually for the past few years.

Now we took out the fixed rate mortgage so that we knew exactly what we would be paying each month and could plan finances accordingly. Everything was going swimmingly until yesterday morning when I received a letter from Nationwide in the post. They are now putting up the rate of interest on our "fixed rate mortgage" by 1.5%.

Apparently as we are letting out our property we are going to cost them more money and are somehow a greater risk. Therefore if we had originally taken out a buy to let mortgage we would be charged a higher rate and be making the company more money. So in order to address this shortfall they are going to put the interest up on our "fixed rate" mortgage.

I do not understand how they can legally do this. Surely they should have informed us when we initially told them we were intended to let our home. If they had we would have reconsidered and may well have sold the property then. Now we are faced with a large increase in our mortgage payments. The rent on our property does not cover our current mortgage payments so there is no way it is going to stretch to this sudden increase.

I realise this is not like my normal blog postings but I feel this issue is something other expats may want to be aware of. Needless to say I am in contact with Nationwide and fighting my corner. I am currently awaiting a copy of the clause in our contract which allows them to change the terms of our 10 year fixed rate mortgage in this way.

A VERY ANGRY EXPAT rant. Thanks for reading :)

The difficult search for a rental in Wellington

We arrived in Wellington on the 27th of February and had booked a holiday cottage for the first 12 days. DH had the first three days off and then was due to start his new job on the Monday. We rather naively thought we could find somewhere to rent in that first weekend.

We had tried to plan ahead as much as possible and had contacted letting agents and set up references before we left home. We had managed to book a couple of viewings for that first weekend and set off to have a drive around Wellington to see what each area was like.

Wellington is a beautiful city. We decided its a cross between Swansea, San Francisco and Balamory. The view as you drive along the highway past the bay and towards the city is breathtaking and I don't think I will ever get tired of seeing it. Much of the city is built into the side of the hills and there are many different styles of house clinging to the sides of the valley. Most of the houses near the centre of the city are of the old wooden colonial style and very beautiful. Its a very different style from UK towns and city's and you are hard pressed to spot any brick built buildings until you get into the centre of the city. Some of the parades of shops in the suburbs look like something you would expect to see in an old mid western town in America.

The picture below was taken from our holiday cottage which was located in Thorndon about 10 minutes walk from the Parliament buildings. It was one of these old colonial style cottages and needless to say this area is quite expensive to live in and way out of our budget.

We had been advised that some of the nice areas to live within commuting distance of Wellington were Karori, Ngaio and Upper and Lower Hutt. We spent our first Saturday in New Zealand frantically driving round these areas to see what they were like and waiting in vain for a letting agent to turn up to show us around a house.

By the end of our first weekend we had narrowed down the areas we were prepared to live in but still had not seen a property we liked. With DH starting work on Monday it looked like I would have to drag the girls around to look at properties during the week.

When looking a properties in New Zealand there is one major problem that you have to look out for. As most of the properties are wooden you have to check for damp. Normally this is very obvious to spot and I ended up looking around quite a few that had that musty smell as soon as you walked in the door or wallpaper that was peeling off the walls. You also need to be very suspicious of any fresh paint.

By the end of Wednesday we were all getting a bit depressed as we had yet to find any property that wasn't showing signs of damp, peeling wallpaper, rotten wood or was too remote and difficult to commute from. There was one property that I don't think I will ever forget looking around as it left me feeling quite traumatised!

It was in a lovely area of Karori so we were both quite keen on it. However as we walked up to it you could see that it wasn't very well maintained on the outside as the paint was peeling. We thought it might be better inside, it wasn't. The floor in the kitchen was slightly wonky and the kitchen was grubby and old (although bizarrely it did have a brand new dishwasher). Then when we walked in the bathroom the owner proudly displayed the sunken bath. Well is was definitely sunken, it looked like an ordinary bath that had just fallen through the floor and they had decided to leave it there. Its very difficult to think of something nice to say to the person who is showing you round when faced with this. So I think in the end we just mumbled something and quickly moved on to the next room.

We could see a view of the back garden from there and spotted a large shed with a lady standing in the doorway. My DH asked what was in the shed and the landlady said not to worry but that was where Mrs X lived and she was honestly no bother as shes very quiet and wont intrude. It was at this point that we rapidly made a retreat. The house with the sunken bath and an old lady living in a shed in the back garden was not for us!

I managed to make appointments to view two properties on the Thursday and we decided to look slightly further out of Wellington to see if you got more for your money. It turned out that both of the properties we looked at were great but one in particular stood out. The views across the bay were spectacular and I don't think I really looked at the rest of the house. The picture below is the view from the living room balcony where I am now typing this. I think you'll agree we chose the right house.