Star jasmine, that is.

We’ve planted star jasmine ourselves, but we’ve never had one as happy as this one that came with our new house.

It smells wonderful, especially late at night and early in the morning.

Our tulip tree makes these outrageously sensuous flowers. However, they are verrrry delicate in the wind and rain.

(And for all the non-English English speakers like me, “metal” in this post’s title means “gravel”, which is something that had me perplexed for a long time…)

Yesterday we made what will probably be our last visit to our old house.

They say go lightly in the world, leave only footprints. And mostly we do. And mostly it’s right.

But it’s still a little sad seeing the place so empty of us, with only the imprints of furniture feet left…

We bought our new house before selling the old one. There were a couple of reasons for that. First, we felt some time pressure on the new one… if we had had to make our offer contingent on sale we likely wouldn’t have been successful. Second, we wanted to paint and stage our house for maximum impact, because we were afraid that in a crowded market we might get overlooked.

So, we took out a bridge loan for essentially the entire purchase price, giving us five months to either pay it off or refinance. A potentially expensive option, especially if the house didn’t sell.

After a 4-week campaign of open houses and online ads and so on, we were lot 5 of 6 at yesterday’s auction. We didn’t know until the last second whether there would be any bidders, but in the end there were two. That’s really good, because the competition really does jack up the price.

During the actual bidding, the $$ didn’t quite reach the reserve price. At that point, the auctioneer takes the leading bidder into the back room and gently puts his hands around their throat while looking deep into their eyes, purring and hissing and spraying pheromones out of a special deal-closing gland. Another $100k magically appears.

Sold.

It’s a big relief for us, because I’m still unemployed and so refinancing might have been tricky.

And as a bonus, I got to meet this guy, Shane Cortese, who was in a bunch of NZ TV shows maybe 10-20 years ago that we watched on DVD when we first got here. He was part of a revolving group of people who produced what I thought was a really good body of work. He gave Hollywood a try, and ended up back here doing these auctions. I remember seeing the announcement of his career change in the paper.

One of our fellow pétanque players makes his living as a semi-itinerant arborist. He’s in town at the moment so we hired him for a day’s work clearing jungle. Money well spent.

In several of our homes I’ve felt a need to start things off by taming the green growing things. In Missouri it was the trees growing on the dam to our little lake. In hindsight that was probably a mistake… it looked worse without them and probably didn’t perform any better. Here in our Birkenhead house we had exuberant English ivy taking over a fence. The initial hacking back was a few weekends of work, but then it was much more under control in subsequent years.

Now, we have a steep slope down to the water. At some point, previous owners put in paths and plants and even an irrigation system. But it’s all completely overgrown and more or less impassable. Gordon the arborist made a big dent in opening things back up, but it remains to be seen how much we’ll actually get down there.

Our last house had a huge wall of built-in bookcases in the family room, thanks to the previous owner’s record collecting habit. That gave us the freedom to display a bunch of things in a way that didn’t overwhelm the living space.

Over the years we’ve accumulated a lot of such items. Souvenirs, knick-knacks, tchotchkes: the words we use to talk about them are all a little bit denigrating.

Now we have a smaller version of the same shelving setup, so choices have to be made. We laid everything out and sorted into three piles: display, store, and donate. I suppose the full Kondo approach would have been even more severe, but we have storage space and years of retirement stretching ahead of us. The more draconian cull will come later in life.

A few boxes of our stuff made it to the Salvation Army. And seeing our things there offers perspective: the memories may be priceless and unique and helped shape us into who are we today, but the souvenir wineglass is $2.

The very first box in the new house. We spent the last weekend in June moving various fragile and awkward things ourselves so the movers could whoosh through on Monday.

We filled up a truck AND a cargo van.

It took a few days to start really cooking.

Somehow, all this eventually fit into the closets.

The payoff.

We’re all moved in to our new house. Well, almost… there’s still pictures to hang and some things to organize. But for everyday activities, we’re here, and we know where our stuff is.

It’s been mostly a full time job, going hard the first week of unpacking and slowing down gradually. I think we can pretty much say that moving is done and normal puttering is beginning. Today, for example, we triaged our pictures, and I put some of those little rubber bumpers inside cabinet doors… why the previous owners didn’t do that is baffling!

The silver lining in the cloud of unemployment has been that I’ve had the time to do all this settling in. But that can’t last forever, and next week I’m back on a plane for a networking event that has taken on new importance.

We’ve been growing these little mushroom forests lately out back under the dragon tree. We guess the spores came along with the mulch laid down a few months ago by landscapers we hired to spruce up that part of the back garden.

There are a lot of mushrooms in the world! Somebody who sounds confident on Reddit says they might be in the genus Parasola or Coprinopsis. They shared a link to a site with all the deets on how to tell one from another… but it’s tiring just to look at.

They appear and wither in a day… quite beautiful in the morning but blackened, ripped and contorted by nightfall. Apparently they digest themselves to better spread spores.

Isn’t that where Harry Potter lived before becoming his full wizarding self? Even though we had no aspiring wizards here, we decided to spruce up the space with paint and carpet.

Here’s what it looked like before…

It was an easy project in the scheme of things, and we got it done in a day, including two coats of paint on that very thirsty drywall. This was my first experience with carpet tiles. Two thumbs up.

This silver birch has been sickly for years and our neighbors finally decided to take it down. They’d been holding off because a bunch of birds seem to enjoy perching in its bare branches, including morepork (owls) and kereru (wood pigeons).

On the day the arborist came, even with the chainsaw idling ominously, the kereru came by for one last look around.

Compared to the USA, in NZ it’s much more common to move into a house without any appliances (or whiteware as it’s known here). We negotiated with our sellers to leave everything behind for us. Even though most of the appliances were somewhat older, they were good quality brands, and we didn’t want the hassle of shopping for those big items while we were moving.

But things break. Our stove lost a burner a few weeks ago, and we were pretty easily swayed to buy a new one instead of repairing it.

The new cooktop is about 6 inches wider, giving us an additional burner. But most importantly it’s induction!

So far we like the controls better than the old stove (although we wouldn’t have minded actual knobs you can turn, that’s basically not an option on these drop-in cooktops) and we REALLY like the quick heat and cool of the induction elements. All our good pans (thank you Costco in 2008 or so) work just fine on the induction surface.

We already replaced the oven last year… what will go next? Maybe our second-hand freezer, or maybe the microwave? Time will tell…

There’s the new windows, which make all our secondhand furniture look better, don’t you think? And more importantly : All the leaks that led us to this point are fixed.

After a series of delays and more cost than we really wanted, we’re all cozily buttoned up with actual double-paned windows that open to a nice amount (two down, all the rest to go). We’ll remember fondly the idea of having what a window repair guy with the gift of the gab called a ‘small conservatory’ (just a bay window in fact), but actually the new arrangement is nicer and more functional.

Now… what’s the next project going to be???