Move of server

I have migrated the blog to my domain at www.bindy.co.nz Progress continues there.

Progress

Progress indeed. Mid January saw the boys helping out with house site preparations.

We headed off to Golden Bay on the annual pilgrimige ( brilliant weather this year!) with some trepidations as the slab was due to be poured in the first week of our holiday and the frames erected during the decond week.  Texts from home kept us up to date while co-ordinating heating and building teams saw some delays. In the event we returned to a nicely curing slab and were here to see frames erected.

It is an extroadinary process that seems to hobble together skilled processes with error management. It has been observed that if medics managed patients the way builders erect building tribunals would be very busy but somehow it seems to come together. Not much is irrevocable or as the builders quip “everything is fixable”. Two builders down to health matters saw a new man on the job and with only one frame put up back to front the skeleton was erected relatively quickly.

The build is about two weeks behind schedule but there is the potential to pick up time on the window order.

Murray and I have been doing our valiant best to make final decisions and after a few days researching tabs, basins , tiles and wooden flooring we think we may be getting to th point where the thing starts to gel…. nearly…

New Year

In the nick of time before Christmas we got off the ground with filled foundations.  We  missed the slab being laid by a couple of days due to bad weather and possible a bit of is communication but in the end it should  mean a positive start with all action from Jan 12.

Founds 20ish December

This  image shows dining room and lounge, bedroom in far corner. The pile of rubbish in the foreground will become deck that adjoins old house.   The far pile of wood just visible is the old shed which now awaits ceremonial burning in Autumn.

Old and new house joined by lights for Christmas

The anticipation is that some time before June we will be in the long anticipated ‘new bit’.  The time line for the build ends with a hand over date of April 29th  with the all important watermark “Subject to Change”!  It is unlikely Tom will be holding his 17th birthday party there but maybe  it will be ready for my 50th? – or maybe I will have my 50th when it is ready?  Whatever we are out of the ground and those who have done it before say things will move pretty fast from here until they slow again for interior detailing.

Before Christmas a friend got the old dining room converted for Tom ’s bedroom to start the new school year in. This will mean condensing living spaces for a while… Thanks to the team at Portabuild we have temporarily aquired a portable building for drums and otherwise  hanging out which is to the boys what the old living rooms will be when  we move.

The break has been spent waging junk wars.  Today may well see the long dreamed of shed workshop come to fruition – it is to be a long dreamt of a masterpiece of classification.  Murray also put up a shade sale over the deck of the old house . Thanks to the efficiency of a mega hardware store  (whose heiress is dear to Tom’s heart! ) it was effected in one afternoon – we went to buy mouldings!

More soon on kitchen design.

Historic Houses in Sydney

We have just spent  a  few days in Sydney to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Powerhouse Museum and to go to the Impressionists at the Galler y of New South Wales.   The latter we walked to in torrential rain – we thought heat would be our problem.  The former was interesting but no I understand as good as the previous exhibit, especially for anyone who has devoured the Eye Witness books. Havinga family membership to teh phm we went every day there.  David and I ahd a great time playing with some of teh digital exploration exhibits for the permanent decorative arts exhibit.

For me the trip was a chance to visit old friends Felicity and Ian Thompson. Felicity has now made me two pairs of shoes from her Gypsy Shoes range. They are a joy to wear.  I spent one evening with Fliss and her kids and realised I do not really get to do girl things. Just small thoughts that escape notice in the continual  company of boys.

The highlight of my trip was a tour of two historic houses with Ian , driving around Sydney in their old VW.   Ian is   a restorer and creator of objects for the Historic Houses Trust and spent the day telling me the “good stories behind things”.  See his web site here but watch for the new version coming soon.

First stop was Elizabeth Bay House. I had been there once before with my friend Peter Scrivener , also part of the Museum sector in Sydney and now at Museum of Northern Territory. Exploring with Peter is always guaranteed to reveal treasures.  Years ago he introduced me to the house of Sir John Soanes in London and our visit to Elizabeth Bay had been a highlight of a previous visit.    Ian uncovered new layers of understanding of the place.  It is astounding that it was once divided in small apartments. Now it’s symmetry and architecural spaces have been restored and the Trust is slowly populating its rooms with authentic artefacts – not always those with provenance but as nearly as possible.  My favoutite things in it are the shutters which fold back into the window surrounds.   New evidence  has suggested the house’s location was not random but in fact the huge excavation into rock that set the house on a different orientation to most of the grand houses of the period, was to capture the sun at soltice.   This idea elaborates the forms and mathematical proportions of the spaces.  Small  ante rooms created by the oval central hall give the house  a very special utility as well as flow.

Ian pointed out numerous pieces he has made or restored for the house including the pieces in the Bulter’s Pantry and the specimen cabintes in the study.  In the case of the Butler’s pantry archival discovery informed the design of the cabinet using paint outlines on the walls.   Such  are the secrets of archival work and are so numerous that they could not all be made accessible. We did discuss how digital collections do make such discovery more widely accessable.  I had not previosuly made the connection that the owner of the house was the creator of the MacLeay collection at the Sydney University Campus ( another Museum visited at Pete’s recommendation).   These ‘old’ style museums embue such magic that I am not sure could be translated into digital form. That is their charm – the evocation of that period of the studied collection when time moved at the same pace but there was less busi-ness to fit intot it.

Next stop was Vaucluse House – an entirely different affair architecturally. The temperature was in the 30’s but inside the house was cool becasue of its thick stone walls.  Pastiche would be a good description of its mix.  It does not have the arhitectural form of Elizabteh Bay but is a wonderful example of how a house of that period functioned with stables, cellars and a working kitchen. 

On the kitchen window sill were some gorgeously decorated pies as if the cook had just popped them there to cool while she went up to the kitchen garden.   I was reminded of some of the ideas that infomed how I want to build our daily operation in teh new house and am sure that these ofl kitchen designs will be revisited eventually.  Up thehill the garden is full of heritage fruits and vegetables and is an extensive restoration project in its own right. Ian showed me more pieces that he has built from evidence and research.      At the end of one one hall way is a room created for one of the children just as we have patched a room “in  a cupboard” for Nick and Ian and Fliss ahve segmented spaces for their children.  Though this room at Vaucluse is ornate in its wooden cabinetry it is still entirely makeshift, the wall not meeting the ceiling.  Nothing changes in a way.

Lastly Ian took me on a tour of his workshop where he tied together many of the threads of the day’s stories.  A bit of museum in it’s own right, this space is a testament to having commitment and belief in ones craft and following ones nose to realise dreams.

Zen and the art of house building

Well, all those who said there’s be no slab by Xmas, take a point. It is simply too tedious to go into why. Just the usual sort of mis communications, weather, things not lining up… whatever.   Block are sitting out in their plastic wrap waiting to be set in place and the concreted.

There is no point in foot stamping or blaming. Everyone is doing their best.

Photo’s coming.

Irises

Iris bank

(can anyone name the blue flowers – they are like mini agapanthus?)

The highlight of November was the flowering of the new Iris bed. Thanks to the Iris Garden at Motukarara and Lisa Ashworth’s donations I have created a bank of Iris.   I count this as  my greatest achievement – yes better than the MA!  Not all flowered this year but it was still an amazing display.  For some the short flowering defeats the purpose – somehow for me it just makes it more dramatic.  Almost finsished now I am already anticipating next year!

The natives that form the backdrop to this garden are all sourced from the Motukarara DOC nursery and are the species that would have originally grown here.  Decapitated pines are the remnant of the clean up after the storm of 2000. Chips on the path are from the trees that were removed for the building site.

At the other end of the house

Setting up to survive the building process has involved ensuring access and the maintenance of some aesthetics at the other end of the house.   We now enter from the other side of the property and have moved the fish pond to the lawn by the pear tree.

What was sort of a back water  has become and important oasis although the tear drop lawn making a peaceful shady place to sit in summer has been on my drawing board from the beginning.  The boys set up the fish pond and the fountain using the stones from the old garden at the eastern side of the house and our second generation fish are doing really well.  Fresias, peony and blue agapanthus type bulbs have all tranferred from there too to maintain the heritage of the garden as much as I can.

Rhodos by the tennis court that we nearly lost seem to be holding their own.  Thanks to a advise from a nursery man, the gardeners at UOC  and layers of pea straw. ( Thanks Ralph!)

Fish pond and peaceful lawn

Looking towards the building site

Iris bank

New Rhodo garden

Footbridge to Rhodos

Foundations

We did some work on WordPress and discovered we could export using Picasa and that it is possible to insert a gallery to the post.

A big day today – foundation digging has begun!

(as I write this the boys and Murray are following a pandemic spread around the world in some flash game -  a strange suspension of reality as Murray occasionally ensures their pandemic definitions are vaguely plausible! )

Digging the foundation trenches

David in the retaining wall post hole

New Septic being delivered

New septic in the ground – connected by new drains

Breaking up the old septic

From old house study door

The old septic

Engineer checking the old septic

Foundation digging

The outline emerges

Foundation trench meets old house – retaining in background

Kitchen

It would seem to all be coming down to Italian design for the kitchen. Here’s how…
David sang in the Christ’s College Choir last weekend at some fund raiser so I took Cola for a walk in the city streets – a novelty for us both. I came across a store having a  sale and discoverd the kitchen of my dreams.  In full stainless steel Arclinia would be my unqustioned choice.  While in Auckland I went to the larger showroom of the store – Matisse NZ and am seeing therio CHCh designer tomorrow.  It may all be far too out of reach but watch this space…

I discovered, as in a ll things, I am going against the grain in that : I don’t mind SS smudges and scratches – they make it look as though its being used!  Thsi would never do for Adrienne who would prefer the aluminium laminate.

Similarly, instead of getting a larger oven I have decided I want to ave a second gas oven – so one gas, one electric. This is most unusual it seems… why go gas when all things are going steam infused etc etc. – well my only answer is that I want teh slow cook function … and it will work in a power cut! Even in cities where gas is reticulated no one is buying gas… Maybe its a green issue?

On the way to Matisse I found myself in a high end wholesalers who had a great dispaly of the Designer’s Guild Royal Collection.  Such exquisite work makes life worth living.

Cabbages and strings…

This post is not about the house…. its about why there have not been any more posts – or more to the point photos about the house….

I have just been up to Auckland to the National Digtial Forum.  Matters shared around the GLAM sector ( galleries, libraries, archives and museums) have convinced me this virtual sharing of memory and experience  – eg the flickr Commons - is worthwhile adventure.  New knowledge building and real buildings have some interesting parallels worthy of expanding but for now -the main thing I picked up for the purposes of this blog were some tips on nice ways to integrate content.

I’ve been held up on the goal of making out build sharable by technical constraints.   Some posts have been drafted and then the frustration of waiting for even the simplest of links to load has thwarted their publication.
Issues are :

• my knowledge of how to make the things that deliver the content work well
• the cumbersome – less than timely- link between the worpress server and my interface.

Solutions include :

• getting the thing hosted on a server closer to home and more specifically tailored to my needs – i wil need to pay for that – thus there really is no such thing as a free share….
• shifting the photstream to a separate thing that is embedded in the blog… monetarily free but maybe not so ‘free’ of cost to my privacy? See below.
• limiting images and links when I post  – somewhat defeats the purpose.

I find myself less than able to shed the shackles of cynicism and skepticism about privacy.    To do this blog thing – and the flickr sharing etc – one has to be fine about anyone tapping in and extracting whatever about ones life.

Maybe because this project is about my home, my place,  that my sensitivity is a bit more acute. I find myself resisting giving out all…I could of course limit the blog to just friends but then that puts them in a position of needing to have memberships if they want to view and I do not wish to request that of them… Back to the open caring and sharing world of Web3.0  (see below) and a suspension of my doubts about what’s crawling around the web…

SO you’ll have to wait until :

1: I have explored what the connection across Flickr and Yahoo … Are we here in NZ subejct to a different relationship with Flickr than its proponents in Aus due to the xtra relation?- thus how ‘common’ is our commons I wonder?  Big institutions are not the same os ordinary consumers…  they have the luxury of IT managers and firewalls and they have their own rights and privacy policies……

2: I have found the bit in the telecom privacy policy that tells me if they sell my data.  So far I have only found the bit that says they can change the policy any time they like but they WILL send me an email to tell me they have done it .. I wonder if that will be before or after they sell me? Yahoo’s is much more overt and clear but says much the same.

3: I have worked out which persona I am going to go to the world with.  (interesting discussions on private / public at ndf…)

4: what – if anything – I don’t want to share – with anyone – and where I will keep it?

And the cabbage : Only  1/7 is doing well but I had strawberries from my patch for breakfast this morning.

…

What is Web 3.0

But if I were to guess what Web 3.0 is, I would tell you that it’s a different way of building applications… My prediction would be that Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as applications which are pieced together. There are a number of characteristics: the applications are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone, the applications are very fast and they’re very customizable. Furthermore, the applications are distributed virally: literally by social networks, by email. You won’t go to the store and purchase them… That’s a very different application model than we’ve ever seen in computing.

—Eric Schmidt CEO Google from Wikipedia article