Building a house takes some time

Hi there!
Another long overdue, but hopefully highly anticipated update from the land of the long white cloud.

What have we been up to you might ask....well . . . as most of you already know by now, we have bought a piece of land in the hopes to built our own house on it one day. Slowly, that dream is becoming reality. After the summer holiday (end of January) we started talking to 5 building companies about our plans. We roughly sketched what we had in mind a made a long list of wishes to be included. As the economy also slows down here in New Zealand as everywhere else at the moment, those companies are rather keen and tried hard to win us as a client. This was good news for us as it gave us some room for negotiations. After many meetings and several drafts we finally could choose one. We have signed a contract with a builder called Orange Homes.
For the Dutch: yep, huis van Oranje :-)

At the moment we have two horses called Sandy and Shirley on our land (owned by a colleague of George). They are doing a really good job keeping the grass down....and fertilizing it at the same time..there is horse shit all over the place. The picture was taken in February. As you can see the grass is quite brown. Now, after some rain it is all green again (see first picture).

We are still amazed. Besides owning a piece of New Zealand, we will also have our very own house here, hopefully finished before Christmas 2009!
But before the whole building process can start, there are some minor hurdles to take. Well, that is what you get when building rurally! Because of the proposed central position of the house on the land, we will need to extend the power, telephone and water from the their positions near the roadside. Also, we need to have a gravel driveway put in going from the roadside to the house. If we don't do that there is an increased risk that some (concrete) trucks might get stuck in the mud. Of course, there is not one company that can do all of those jobs themselves, so we need to find (affordable) contractors for all the different type of jobs. So we do a lot of calling and emailing to get some quotes and compare their prices. When we get all of those quotes together we need to go to the bank and ask for a mortgage that will pay all of those bills and at the same time will present us with affordable mortgage repayments. To give you a rough idea of what the house will look like and its proposed position on the plot, we have uploaded some scans of the sketches!
We should receive some detailed drawings from our building company in the next couple of days.
Look out for an update on the build soon.

Esther had a Golf Day from work. As only in New Zealand, that means playing golf for a whole day and being catered with sandwiches, beer and wine...on the golf course while playing. Obviously, it was an awesome day!



Easter weekend just finished. Although it is autumn, we had great weather with lots of sun. We went for a 3-hour walk in the Port Hills yesterday and today we walked on Sumner Beach. Not too bad.
No Easter Bunnies yet, if there are some Lindt ones left, we will buy them this week for half price...can't wait to knock their head off!

Cheers
Esther and George

Short vacation in Cromwell

We spent a couple of days in Cromwell, Central Otago.
Some keywords: Sun, wind, walking, wild thyme, remote, views, vineyard, peaceful, rabbits, fun!
Needless to say how amazing the scenery is...
Enjoy it for yourself and have a look at the pictures!

Seasons Greetings

It is the time of the year: Christmas with the all those awful songs, present hunting, tree decorating, cookie baking and drinks...but it is still very hard to get in the mood with 25 degrees. No more homemade cookies made by Esther's mum, so she is forced to make them herself. They turned out rather nice :-)
No turkey or ham this year, but a BBQ, doesn't sound too bad, does it?

We bought ourselves a nice HUGE Christmas present. It is a great lifestyle plot (no house) just south of the village Cust, about 30 minutes drive from Christchurch. Well, the "huge factor" is of course based on the size of the plot: 4 hectares... can you believe that??
2009 will be focused on building our own house, or to be precise: having it build.

Search for "257 Earlys road, Cust, NZ" in Google Maps.
Since a couple weeks Streetview is available for many roads in NZ. It's great to wander around a have sort of a live look at so many places. Unfortunately is was cloudy when they took the pictures in Cust. To prove that we will have mountain views, I attached some pictures. :-)

Have a great Christmas!!

1 YEAR NZ

On 18th October, we passed a milestone: 1 year in New Zealand, can you believe it??
As we are really lazy with updating this weblog, I will upload a lot of pictures so you have at least something to look at.

In the first weekend of October, we went for a walk near Castle Hill. It's about 1,5 hours drive from Christchurch. It's a great to wander around the weird rock formations as you can see on the pictures. Looks a bit like Dartmoor in the UK.









14th November is Canterbury day. It' s a public holiday and we were both off work. The biggest A&P Show (for the Swiss: like the OLMA) in NZ is held in Christchurch on this very day. Many farm animals have their own competition: from chickens, sheep, cows to alpacas and even ducks and pigeons. There are also many farm machines...and they are huge! And of course, there is not just one machine, but lots and lots, incredible!! We walked around for about 4 hours and still haven't seen all of it.
It was a great day out on a hot summer day!




Some more random pictures...

Do you know what a Cicada is ? They are about 4cm long and make a hell of a noise!! It's quite a tropical sound and it took us a while to figure out what the source of that noise is. Those little beasts can produce such an amount of decibels that when walking in Hagley Park here in the city, you almost have to cover your ears.



Still amazing how empty beaches are over here. We really appreciate that parking next to beaches is free, space is available and there are no traffic jams to the beaches...and it's just a 20 minutes drive from home :-)

Enjoying the warm and sunny weather on the deck with a game of table tennis and a gorgeous cool beer. That's the life guys!!


We will update the weblog very soon as we have more news...be did purchase something HUGE!!!!

Long overdue update...

Hello people,
is has already been 3 months since our last update. But you know, it's true what they say: No news is good news. We are doing fine, enjoying ourselves and just do what Kiwis do, try to be outdoors a lot!
Winter has come and gone and it definitely turning into spring. Days are getting longer and we will change the daylight saving time in a week. We went for a walk in Hagley Park to have a look at the thousands of daffodils. Everything is in bloom and looks amazing. Unfortunately, spring also means that George is suffering from hay fever again.




Some updates which were long due:
We received our Permanent Residence status and are allowed to live and work in New Zealand. It also means that we are entitled to vote, which we can do for the first time in November for National Elections. It also means that the collection of stickers in our passports grew again by another two.

We also got our refund from customs (import tax) we initially had to pay, but than later was returned to us. Customs admitted that they were wrong and send us a check. YES!

Esther is already working more than 4 months again at Davis Ogilvie. Colleagues are friendly and the work load is growing, getting more and more interesting and challenging.
George has a new position within his current company; he is now a Systems Administrator Operations. It is a step up from his previous job and he will be doing more challenging work now. An extra advantage is that he doesn't need to do shift work on a weekly basis (only to fill in for a collegue if he is away). He also get's the opportunity again to administer the much loved *cough* email system Lotus Notes...

George joined a group of people for a friendly pick up game of frisbee in Hagley Park. The grass was rather muddy and wet as you can see in the picture. George soon discovered that not doing any sports for a decade seriously impacts his general fitness!
As Esther's fitness level was also not so well, we decided to buy a cross-trainer. The main advantage is that we can exercise at whatever time we like and during any type of weather. It works surprisingly well for us; we use it a couple of times a week, more than we used our rowing machine in The Netherlands.

Rural living training :-)
As you can see from this image, we have been training for our future lifestyle outside "the big smoke" (any big city in NZ; Christchurch in our case). From couch-potato to stable-boy in a day! We helped out at the Studfarm of Cathy De Vries, one of George's co-workers at Foodstuffs.
We are starting to look around for a property outside Christchurch with some extra space (between 2 and 4 hectares would be perfect). Buying some land and building our own house is probably not financially possible at this time, so we are mainly concentrating on some land with a good quality house already on it.

Last weekend, we went on our first ski-trip in New Zealand. Mount Hutt ski-field is only a 2 hours drive from Christchurch, so we got up early on Saturday and together with some other Dutch friends drove up the mountain. We decided to try snowboarding and booked a lesson which taught us the basics in 3 hours. The weather had been excellent all day, so we enjoyed it all immensely. Snowboarding is completely different to skiing, hence you fall a lot in the beginning. But at the end of the day, we managed to slide down the practice hill without too many difficulties. This years skiing season is ending soon, but we (especially George) enjoyed snowboarding so much that we will take some more lessons next season.