This is a week of pictures of things - how they 'should be' and how they actually are. First up is a cutting that Howdy Neighbour sent me from Queenstown. My first house has been sold. Him Outdoors and I bought it in 2000 after we had been made homeless due to the flooding and landslides of the previous year. A lot of filming was going on in the region (TLOTR and Vertical Limit) and landlords realised that due to short-term demand, they could send the rents sky high. They never came back down.
We had contents insurance that covered us for the six months of moving ourselves, our two cats and all our belongings from friends' spare room to flat to apartment to caravan to holiday home while the Earthquake Commission checked all the details of our situation. I performed in a charity gig to raise funds for flood and landslide victims (I sang Slip Slidin Away). The bankers and the landlords made money. Lots of money.
A friend was selling his house and moving - he said we could rent it until he could find a buyer. It was out of our price range, but we knew we had to make a move as the housing market wasn't getting any easier to get into, rents were rising rapidly, available housing was in very short supply, and we had to live somewhere. We bought it. We received some very kind and gratefully appreciated assistance from my parents. It took everything we had financially. It was called Mühlstein when we bought it, which means millstone in German, and (as the home loan required to buy it was my first ever mortgage) we kept the name.
It was a cute little property - the show-home for the region and the first house built on the peninsula that was Kelvin Heights. It was a wooden A-frame with cracks between the planks that let the winter chill inside, and no heating apart from a temperamental old wood burner. The first houses in the area had to be built along alpine chalet lines (until that development craze took over whereby, if the builder had the cash, they could erect whatever monstrosity they liked). It was on a street called Four Views Avenue, which is what was originally on offer before it was 'One View from the Upstairs Balcony and Next-Doors' Bathrooms' Avenue. From beautiful but humble (and cold) beginnings, Kelvin Heights became the first million-dollar suburb in New Zealand.
We spent five very happy years in our little cabin-like abode, with many visitors and guests both short and longer-term, and we had the most wonderful neighbours with whom we made life-long friendships. We sold it to move to Arrowtown (the second million-dollar suburb in New Zealand as it turns out - damn, we have expensive tastes). That was over ten years ago, and it has changed hands and ownership several times since. This article shows its latest incarnation; the second image down on the left-hand side is how it looked when it was ours.
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| This old house |
Here, by popular request, are a couple more of my 'Nailed It' photos from recipes I have attempted. The first is reasonably successful; the second not so much. But they were both very tasty!
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| Cauliflower, Gorgonzola and walnut tart; their version |
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| My version |
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| Both together |
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| Roast Butternut Pumpkin - their version |
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| My effort |
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| Him Outdoors made us cafe-style breakfast |
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