s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Sunday, Chris graciously drove me up and down more twisty little mountain roads (very twisty, very narrow, very I Hope There’s Not An Articulated Milk Truck Barreling Towards Me From Around That Blind Curve, because that’s a Very Long Drop), in my continuing quest to figure out just *where* we’re going to find a house that has the magic combination of Decent Commute and Land for Beasts. We started by driving up a road that the map would have you believe had nothing at all up it. There’s a quarry at the end nearest the highway (very likely the quarry they put Helm’s Deep in, but I haven’t confirmed this yet), and the other end is obscured in the map book by the Lower Hutt Enlargement. What’s *actually* up there is a lot of high country farmland with some absolutely *spectacular* views:

That’d be Horokiwi, for anyone following along at home. We gawped a lot, and chatted with an elderly British ex-pat who’d driven up with his wife to have a little picnic and take in the view, then came back out and made a stab at driving through Korokoro — which was very pretty, but also very residential, and very vertical — before scarfing down some meat pies and making for the two open houses we were actually aiming for. The first being a gorgeous little 10 acre farmlet up Whiteman’s Valley — which is sort of the next valley over from the Hutt, behind Silverstream, which is where C&N’s house is. It was neatly divided into paddocks by lines of trees and hedge, and on one side a little brook. One had a couple of cows; another had chickens (“chooks”, to rhyme with “books”) and a big black pig. There were a couple outbuildings, and in addition to the flat paddocks, the property continued up the hill behind. The house is what they call a “Lockwood”, and I’m still a little fuzzy about what exactly that means, apart from that it’s all wood paneled inside. It was pretty, but it felt kind of dark, and the rooms were very small.

The other one was in Stokes Valley, which is just south of Silverstream, and very residential. It was…. wacky, as you can see from that third picture. Very modernist. It bordered a track that went up into the reserve, which was nice, but… a little *too* wacky, I think. It was on 3.3 acres — which is why I wanted to see it in the first place — but apart from the bit they’d dug out right there alongside the house, it was all pretty much straight up the hill. Oh well. It’s certainly a good illustration of what Chris and Natasha observed during their own house hunt, which is that there simply *is* no standard house plan. Every house is different, probably necessarily so, in order to deal with each individual site’s combination of terrain and sun. So you can’t just look at a place from the street and say, “Oh, that’s a Colonial” (or a Cape, or a Ranch) and have some idea how the inside is arranged. Anyway, a lot of driving around this weekend, so I’m definitely ready to chill out tonight and watch more Fabulous Hat.