Tuesday; We come into Till after dropping off the trailer, oooh there is a new lock! Tama came yesterday and installed our pin code lock. Rowan quickly realises that the code part is not working. He pulls it apart and Tama element through the wires when he screwed it on 🤦‍♀️. It takes Rowan an hour to rewire it and get it working. Well hey we have a locked house. Now we can put the glass panel back in the back door and have a fully lockable home. We set off on a mission looking for Seal and Peel, it is a special paint on liquid masking tape. Designed to not stick to glass but stick on putty and wood. Meaning I can paint the windows, Rowan can spray the weatherboards and we don’t have to worry about the glass. It just peels off like a plastic wrap when you’re done. Our mission was a bit of a fail. I got some designed for walls but won’t work on windows. We end up ordering some from Christchurch. Cory cracked on with tidying the hedge up, not sure if we will fence down there or not. We can’t make our minds up. I attacked the living room cleaning and removing old wallpaper. I can’t wait till we start painting inside. Rowan pottered but he is pretty stuffed from yesterday’s drive. A day off on the horizon? So far no.

Wednesday; Our Peel and Seal arrived I got to cleaning the windows ready to apply. I got most of the way before our neighbour Laura from across the road invited for lunch. It was really nice, Laura got us sushi and she was celebrating having the kids back at school. We hung out for a few good hours. It is really nice getting to know all the neighbours around us. Back at work, I really want the prep to the glass done so I can prime the putty. This new putty I got only takes a few days before you can paint it. I think the neighbours thought I was crazy painting the windows. I even had a lady walking her dogs ask why I was. I told her nosy neighbours haha. Maybe we can grow some weed while I have all this protection on the glass. Now I can’t do this on the three lead light windows as the paint will stick on the lead, so I will have to cut in nicely and cover them up the old fashioned way when Rowan sprays. Tomorrow we head back to Christchurch to do the next 150 fence posts.

Thursday; Cory starts out on our planer tool. It works like a charm. I wish we had this tool when we did the weatherboards in Bluff and Herbert. Today we are heading up to Christchurch. The original plan was to go after work and arrive late. But for the sake of a half a day hire we can take our time heading up and to be frank we aren’t getting much done as we both need a day off. So we head out of Ōamaru at 11.30am! We op shop in Timaru and shop all the way up to Brooklands. We go straight to our container to load up some of our belongings and attempt to find our tools. Annoyingly we have buried them inside a cabinet behind a cabinet and below a cabinet haha. We load a small amount into the front so the fence posts are more central this time. Then we will load a bit behind the posts. We had a late dinner at Rick & Liz’s house. Unfortunately not much time to catch up.

Friday; We have three errands to do this morning before we end up meeting Marty at 9am. So we head into town at 7am ready to go to the Tool Shed. Cory has already gone through a set of blades so we need to order more. Then we go to my salon supplier for conditioner for Rowan and some treatment for me. As we are there we get a call to say he is early. So we have to head back to Brooklands pick up the trailer and meet him near the boat ramp in Brooklands. It doesn’t take us long to load up. We were on the next side and were nearly done with the front stack when the trailer tilted. I didn’t click what happened and Rowan asked if it is a tilt trailer. No, it isn’t. It has snapped right where the draw bar meets the trailer tray. Well there is no way to get this back to Kaikōura as it is. Luckily he has AA plus membership. Rowan talks him through it, he has used AA numerous times. Luckily he didn’t appear to phased about it. We left him to it but told him to call us if he needs to as we will be in the area loading up for the next few hours. We get back to Liz and have a cuppa with her. There is a bunch of stuff we left in the garage on the agreement that they are welcome to give it away, use it, basically do what they like with it. I checked that Liz was happy with us taking a bunch of it back. This really does save us a lot of money as it is stuff we would need to buy again. We load up the trailer and car from the storage place. We get to the tools and find the all important paint sprayer attachments. We get quite a lot in. Marty calls to tell us he is all sorted and we head out of Christchurch after lunch. We mooch our way back. After Timaru we hit the bad weather and we miss the rain, but the edge of the storm gets us. The wind slows us right down to 50km/60km. We arrive in Ōamaru around 5pm. Unload as much as we can at Till and then head to Herbert to get rid of the posts and the last bits. This is much more civilised, all done by 7pm. Definitely worth the extra cost. We will return the trailer tomorrow and we have left to posts in there so they can repair their fence.

Saturday; Trailer dropped off and I spend the day organising stuff we dumped last night. There is a lot to go through but I quite enjoy pottering. Rowan gets a couple of annoying jobs done so he is happy. Our neighbour directly opposite is selling her house. We go be nosy neighbours and attend the open home. It is the first one and the place is rather busy. Apparently the market is heating up, which is a good sign if you’re wanting to sell. Cory is working, he works on tidying up around the outside and strengthening the garage.

Sunday; As we head into Till we get a message to say Cory won’t be working today. Bugger, we would have planned our day a bit different. Oh well. I get making some to do lists and Rowan puts away some of the tools I have sorted. We don’t bother hanging around long, we wait for our washing to be done and head in to town. We load up the car with tools for Tuesday as we want to spend a day in Herbert getting some jobs done. We go to Mitre10 to pick up some wood and head to Herbert. The plan is to get started now but it is incredibly hot. I get one job done and I just can’t do anymore. I go through my jewellery I got out of storage as it is way more fun haha.

Monday; We have an oven to pick up in Dunedin. Annoyingly she can’t do it. So we go in for a large mirror and then see some friends. On our way in we drop off sheep netting that we found amongst the crap in Till Street. A neighbour down there has a use for it so we promised we would drop it off next time we were coming past. After our mirror pick up we headed to pick up our friends. Mairi & Daniel are from Scotland and we became friends when we stayed in Haast on our journey nearly a year ago. We went out for breakfast and had a great catch up. They are incredibly lovely and are easy going. Hopefully we will get a chance to see each other in a few weeks. They are going to the Caitlins, I am sure they will love it. We used up the rest of the day op shopping around Dunedin. It was really good just having a day off no real goals and it was quite relaxing.