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Yes, as most regular readers will already know, we always like to have a project or two on the go to keep us occupied. This year is no different.
Having completed the extreme makeover at Waiwera, we’re now turning our attention to Great Barrier. The driveway has now been concreted, so that allows us to get lots of ‘big stuff’ up to our house for the more exciting projects.
This winter it’s sheds, garages, renovating the guest apartment, and gutting the kitchen. We’re both now certified TradeMe addicts, having trolled the website for hours purchasing all manner of things from windows, to kitchen benches, to ovens and hobs, to building materials. The demolition yard in Albany is our next favourite place – we now have a truckload of joinery to take to the island for our various sheds and other planned constructions. Later this week we’ll be packing up a furniture truck with building materials and heading across to the island with Peter’s brother who is going to help us smash holes in walls etc. Then we’ll have to rush back to the mainland in a fortnight with another truck to uplift a stunning island kitchen bench (complete with all the cupboards) that we found on TradeMe. We do love shopping!
So that’s our winter mapped out really – lots of shopping for materials, building, renovating and moving things from one island to another – something we’ve come to make a bit of a habit out of!
One of the many tasks we’ve been putting off for ages has been the need to pop over to Kawau to pick up all our stuff we’d left there. When we sold our Kawau house, we sold it fully furnished, but we still managed to fill an entire garage over there with personal effects and other stuff that didn’t sell with the house.
So after a blustery week of rain and wind, we hired a truck, trailer, and barge, and departed from Sandspit for Kawau early on Friday morning. Fortunately the weather was on our side, and a brilliant sunny day emerged to compliment a lovely calm sea.
It was a lovely trip across Kawau Bay to the island, and a nice trip down memory lane as we sailed into Schoolhouse Bay. We said hello to Norm and Jenny who live next to the wharf, and drove the truck up to the garage where luckily one of the many loose keys I’d brought along for the ride happened to fit the lock to the garage (not bad considering 18 months had passed since we last used the key).
We opened the garage with some apprehension – we couldn’t quite remember what we’d left behind, and we didn’t know if the effort involved in recovering our island bounty would actually be worth it. Fortunately the trip was worth it – all those long forgotten ‘treasures’ now recovered and loaded into the truck ready for the trip back to Waiwera.
View from Schoolhouse Bay, Kawau Island
The trip to Kawau was lovely, but it brought with it some closure and recognition that we had moved on to newer pastures (all 13 acres of newer bush clad pasture on Great Barrier Island). We have some excellent memories of great times spent on Kawau Island, and collecting our things from the island helped to provide ’souveniers’ that would help to cement those memories in our ageing, aluminium pot soaked brains.
The trip home (fully loaded)
Once back at Waiwera, the unloading began, and boxes were opened to check contents ready for repacking for the ‘Barrier’. It was like Christmas at our house – goodies everywhere including spare pairs of underwear and slippers! Peter discovered yet more model boats to add to his museum that we are shortly going to build on the Barrier, and I found yet another Kenwood mixer to add to my collection (I now have 3 mixers, 2 blenders, 2 mincers, 6 bowls, a shredder, and a truckload of mixing attachments).
Clearly, despite slowing down and abandoning the ‘rat race’, our obessive compulsive collecting behaviours haven’t ceased, and we both still struggle to part with any of our treasures in case we might need them sometime in the future. We managed to sort through one of the sheds at Waiwera the other day and discovered amoungst other things, 3 forgotten deer heads, boxes and boxes of car models (again for Peter’s museum), and 24 empty antique suitcases.
Someone should notify the men in white coats now. Meanwhile, we’ll continue planning the development of new sheds and garages for Great Barrier so that we have somewhere to store all this cr#p in!
I had one of those nasty moments last week when I felt a back tooth suddenly go crunch while eating lunch, and then I found myself spitting out parts of my tooth (or a filling, or a crown – who can really tell when you’re stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the impending bolt of lightning to strike one in the jaw now that a nerve has probably been exposed somewhere!).
A quick call to the local island dentist (yes, we do have one) revealed that they weren’t going to be on the island for a fortnight, so we hurredly booked a flight to the mainland for a session of emergency dentistry.
Unfortunately the weather decided to intervene, and although my flight got off the ground, it then had to turn back and land again when a nasty set of thunderstorms blocked the way between the island and the mainland. Once the storms cleared (two hours later), we were off again.
So I managed to book into see my mainland dentist Angela just in the nick of time ahead of the weekend (the flight arrived in Auckland at midday on Friday). Angela is a very thorough dentist (www.wellness-dentistry.com). She is the only dentist whose chair I have fallen asleep in, and that was during a root canal of all things!).
Much to my surprise, I found that I hadn’t broken a crown (like I had imagined). Much to Angela’s disgust, she found that my tooth had collapsed because of a nasty cavity that was about half a teaspoon of sugar away from a full root canal. Angela’s therapeutic hand (and drill) prized away the months of decay that I had neglected to manage, and a dentine filling and enamel reconstruction later, I was on my way. Fortunately I think I may have just scraped through not needing a root canal.
Angela is a minimal intervention dentist. She tries to educate her patients so that they can take steps to prevent the need for intensive dental work. This patient, however, had been naughty and hadn’t kept up with the maintenance, but Angela now has me back on track and armed with a flotilla of dental brushes, probes and flossing devices. If you want to have an excellent understanding of the state of your teeth and gums, as well as a game plan that will prevent you needing to spend thousands on dental work, then I’d thoroughly recommend a trip to Angela.
Right, I must be off now to floss!
