A tale of three houses

At last, crimbo over with and the new year looming, I've found some time to fire off the last blog of 2009. It's ending well, everyone fit and well with work picking up for me and our housing situation finally sorted out for the foreseeable future. How we got here, the lovely old wooden bungalow we're now calling home, is a bit of a saga going back to last October.

A wet Saturday morning it was, when Pete, our ex-landlord, rang from the little old Ardèche B&B he & Lois were running. He sounded unusually businesslike and a little nervous, but quickly got to the point: while things in France were verging on idyllic, their restaurant in here in Lyttelton was hemorrhaging cash and, long story short, they were coming home early. Something like a whole year early, in fact. Just days before that phone call we were congratulating ourselves on having properly landed at last, how happy the kids were, how good it was to have all the boxes unpacked, feet under the table, all that sort of dangerous talk.

Tempting fate, me Mam calls it.

I was shocked, Nik was really devastated and neither of us knew how to break it to the kids. That afternoon we received 3 months formal notice by email and all was doom, gloom and long faces, wandering round letting it slowly sink in, but kind of panicked too, as if we had to be out the following day or something. In the day or so that followed we started mentally packing again, began searching the small ads for a new place, had friends offering us a place, still said nothing to the kids, just in case. At times it felt like the best thing was to accept Diane's offer of her garage, which is decked out ready to use as a self-contained flat, and storing our stuff somewhere. For all it would be fun, we would surely miss living up on Voelas. I found myself taking shots of the place – those views from the windows I posted on the losNemo site were part of that – like you do when you're about to return home from holiday and realise you have nothing to remember it by.

And then it all changed again. On the Tuesday we got another email saying he and Lois had had a chat and decided it was a bit unfair to boot us out so soon after we'd moved in, and – sorry for the messing around, but – how about they found somewhere to stay until we got our new place sorted out? They had a friend with a place in town that they rent out, the lease was up for renewal, they'd know by the end of the week for sure. Of course we were hugely relieved and when they confirmed it at the weekend, verging on the euphoric, but something wasn't right. When Lois emailed a list of stuff she wanted to retrieve from the house when they got back, it started to sink in: this was their home, not ours. It would never feel like home to us while they were camped out round the corner. It felt more like squatting. Nik had an urge to start packing again, even though we were probably 6 months away from eviction time. I was completely fine with the squatting thing and carried on taking pictures.

In hindsight I can see I was in flat denial about how comfortable we could be in that situation. Hell, we'd just suffered a bitterly cold, uninsulated winter in a house so summer-oriented, it barely had functional doors and windows. There we were in late spring, the garden bursting with flowers and ripening berries, our little veggie patch just about to yield up its beans and potatoes... there was no way I was giving up all that pained investment so easily. Worse, I'd just spent better part of a month trying to find a rental place for Matt & Antonia who were trying to move here from Auckland and there was nothing even remotely like Voelas Rd on the market. This wasn't deterring Nik, who was finding potential new homes on a daily basis; one was a subdivision of the house next door, but not available til the new year; another just down the street turned out to be little more than a prefab with a driveway. So when she spotted a "to let" sign on the little cottage at the end of the quay one morning, I wasn't holding out hope.

We arranged a viewing that evening and met Sally, the agent, on the doorstep. What a place. It had a familiar smell of old wood and carpet that I couldn't quite place, but belonged somewhere between taxi booking office and school stationary cupboard. The wood-panelled hallway and institutional paintwork gave it a stuffy, unfriendly atmosphere, but the rooms were all full of light and the high ceilings made it feel airy and spacious. Everywhere were the sort of odd little details and quirky anachronisms you only get in houses that haven't been touched in decades; a larder hung on the outside of the kitchen that you access through a little hatch next to the sink; an open fireplace with brass-edged tile hearth and thick wooden sill that was only missing a bakelite clock to be my grandma Huntley's, gawd bless her soul. The new owners, who'd bought it to rent, had added a load of MDF wardrobes and cupboards everywhere, apart from which it was pure untouched Kiwi-ana. It was also quite a bit less expensive than our current place. I really didn't know what to make of it. Deep inside, I knew I would have no say in the matter anyway. Before we even left, Niki was shooting me looks that gave me little doubt. As we said goodbye to Sally I found myself telling her, "We really like it. Can you hold it for us until the morning?"

By suppertime we'd pretty much realised what it would mean to move out of Voelas and into the cottage on the quay. We would definitely miss the garden, and... er... well, that was about it. For all it was a lovely house, it was a pain to live in. More than that, here we had the chance not only to have a place that really felt like home, we'd also be solving a really prickly and complex problem. As chance would have it (or more likely, as is often the case in a small town) Sally was also the agent for Pete & Lois' temporary let. When we explained why we were interested in the cottage, she immediately put two and two together. The owners of that temporary let had decided not to renew the sitting tenants' lease in order to let P & L move in, and she was having trouble fixing up the people who were getting booted out with a new place. That coming Saturday they were due to move out and into a friend's back room, putting their stuff into storage, with P & L to move in on the Monday. A very familiar situation... and for all this craziness was not our doing, it felt like it was in our power to let not only ourselves find a home, we could let two other families have their homes back too. I guess sometimes it's not about desires, it's about wider needs, doing the right thing and all that stuff.

I rang Pete on the Friday, as soon as we'd been and paid the deposit. He was a bit stunned, I think, to hear they were moving back into their own place after all. It was also very much the 11th hour by then. In a minor twist to the saga, the owners of P & L's temporary place had asked Pete to take over from the agent (logically, as he would have been living there) so if the sitting tenants were no longer moving out, he was to be their de facto landlord. Pete therefore asked me to sidestep Sally and contact these guys directly with Pete's details. Not having their phone number, it was a case of trial and error, catching them at home. No-one there Friday lunchtime, I drew a blank in the evening too. Saturday morning I finally caught up with them in their garden, along with all their furniture, piles of boxes, bags, bikes and houseplants and two big blokes with gloves on who clearly owned the van I had to squeeze past in the driveway. I wasn't sure whether to expect hugs & kisses or a good hiding... but they were lovely people, completely gobsmacked at the news that they didn't have to move out after all, which apparently had been breaking their hearts. I saw them in the market a couple of hours later, all chuffed to bits. Apparently the weirdest thing of all was unpacking their boxes into the same house they'd just moved out of. Result!

So here we are in our new place, and feels great. We've grown to love it way more than we thought, much quicker than I imagined. Barely a month on, it feels like we've been here a year, which is always a good sign. The nieghbours are lovely, have two kids slightly older than ours and couldn't be more helpful, introduced us to June, the lady who lived here for almost 50 years before selling up to go and live with her son, at a barbie they threw for the whole street when we moved in. Our first crop of rocket is filling out the veggie patch and the boxes are all unpacked again. Christmas was lovely, relaxed and cosy, largely because it's summer here (duh..) but also cos when that sou'westerly blows, the doors and windows actually keep it out. The view across the harbour are amazing, the port that never sleeps is the source of endless fascination, town is a short walk away and somehow, in all the excitement, we seem to have lost sight of the section up the hill. This is now the challenge, to keep pressing on with those plans without the pressure to move that we always had before. Next year might well prove to be a test of our commitment and determination but at least it'll be free from disruption and cardboard boxes. Touch wood!