Project Sunny O

About 7 years ago the lovely T & I bought a nifty little house at Otaki Beach, to which we retired every second weekend or so to loaf, put dead animals to the flames & weed the garden. It was about a minute’s walk from the beach & just across the road from a very nice bar & restaurant. Well within staggering distance of home…

About 2 years ago we were getting tired of weeding the garden & decided we’d really like a bit more land than the hallowed ¼ acre section we had. We started to look around at "lifestyle" properties in the area. Not with a view to engage in small farming though, Although we did have romantic notions of roaming an orchard paradise sipping on glasses of wine…

About 3 years ago, we got married in a large private garden across the road from our beach house. The very hospitable Mary & Tim who own & maintain that garden, pointed out a very overgrown paddock next door & noted that it had recently sold. "Bugger", the T said, "wish we’d known…"

Then, slightly more than a year later, one Sunday afternoon, perusing the property press, I spotted a 2 ½ acre property for sale in the area. And lo… it was our overgrown paddock. We had a look, but since the tenants weren't there & the place was guarded by a very large dog, we were only able to inspect the paddock & some of the "outbuildings". The inverted commas are there because these outbuildings were essentially freestanding firewood with concrete foundations & broken cladding of some sort which was probably declared a health risk a long time ago & outlawed. Giving it heaps of thought, we made an offer on Monday....

However later that week, after our offer was accepted, we had a good look at the rest of the outbuildings (salvageable – just/maybe), and the house. T said it may not have been the ugliest house she ever saw, but it definitely was the ugliest house she ever bought.

It was decorated in spanish-kitsch, appeared to have 1930s wiring & electrics... with that chunderosa textured plaster work indoors. So it was like a nicotine stained pavlova. We decided to have the lot sanded flat before we moved in & hoped to achieve a nice stone look on the inside.
It needed considerable cleaning.....

Some previous owner was so pleased with the Spanish look, they gave it one of those twee names emblazened on the side of the chimney (apologies if any of you have emblazoned twee names on the side of your houses, but, I ask you, what were you thinking?...). It's called San Leonardo :-) We may rename it, or we may name all the "outbuildings" after the other Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles, San Rafael sounds pretty neat. He's my favourite. So angry & cool.....
Of course, I wanted to call it the High Chaperral, with a two storey gate at the front & guards... but inexplicably, that suggestion was vetoed. (Didn't you ever wonder why the Apaches always rode up to the heavily armed gate when they were attacking? Like, why didn't they just ride around the back, where there was an unfenced area the size of Australia?...)

So it's got the ranch house at the front, with lots of lawn & a highly overgown garden around it, with a sleep-out thing attached via a little deck. And the sleepout is a completely different style to the rest of it & stuck out like a sore thumb, and it looked like it was built by your father - unless your father is a builder or has any clues at all, in which case it wasn’t like that - but we thought we’d do something simple & effective with it. Or demolish it & have a bigger deck..
Back further, there were a couple of outbuildings that once housed a chicken farm which I thought might be fixed up with a bit of timber & cladding & some hard labour, and a very long ladder.... then further out from that, there's paddock, with some old stables (derelict), a checkerboard of old concrete foundations (upon which, we thought, once stood pig troughs), more paddock, then a low rise of about half an acre planted with youngish pine trees. So there's lifetime firewood. I owned a chainsaw already fortunately....

All very exciting... a busy summer loomed, cleaning & fixing & painting the house, then god knows how long fixing up the salvageable outbuildings.... which are the size of aircraft hangers....
Quite a few trees, and a few old tires & whatnot to make swings out of etc... We planted stuff round the boundaries to improve the view for us & the neighbours. We may plant some sort of cash crop - certainly we'll have a serious vegie garden - and/or some fruit trees etc.

I'm gonna have a party tree out the back somewhere, like in the Lord of the Rings... but without hopefully, the impending sense of doom & despair... or lots of short people.... with a big table underneath for feasting on dead & flamed animals....

And best of all, the Ponderosa is still only 3 minutes from the beach (and one minute from Byron's Bar & Restaurant!)

T went through a 4 foot high stack of old gardening magazines & pulled out all the pictures she wanted to use for inspiration (seem to be a lot of jobs for me involved in all those pictures.... nothing a bit of enthusiasm & a chainsaw can't handle though, I thought, while she sands the walls flat...).

This blog, amongst other things, will be the story of one family creating heaven on earth from a run down chicken farm, in their weekends.