Our Villa, Our Home

God has blessed us amazingly in giving us this home for a price we could afford. The “value” of the home is about 80% above what we paid for it, but the previous owners were motivated to sell. They’d had it on the market for more than a year.

The gardens are amazing, and the orchard is beautiful. Since moving in, we’ve added half a dozen more trees, and some berries and grapes, among other things. We grow our own veges in raised boxes covered with windbreak cloth to keep out the insects.

The villa has two “bedrooms” and a very large lounge that can be divided about one third of its length by accordion doors. For our first winter, we’ve been living in the one third of the lounge that has the wood stove. As you can read in Dave’s blog, we installed a heat pump in the main bedroom and will using that for our bedroom henceforth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have several outbuildings, including our sleepout, the garage and a small attached shed, three sheds in the orchard, a potting shed (though this is really just a raised platform and frame with mesh all around), and two water tanks.

Our sleepout is a two room separate building with a bedroom and a kitchen. The toilet is off the kitchen, but there is no shower or tub. We plan to host people through Couch Surfing, as well as having our friends and family visit us.

The main water feed to our villa is a smaller tank that is fed by the creek which flows behind our property, though the inlet for the tank is much higher up the valley. A second and larger water tank is fed by rainwater falling on our roof, and this tank waters the gardens, though we can also turn on an inlet to run into the house if we want. We also have a water tap (faucet) in the orchard area which runs off our neighbor Allan’s water, which in turn also comes from the same creek water inlet that feeds our main water tank.

The view from our villa overlooks a neighbor’s rooftop across the Firth of Thames to the Hunua Ranges (mountains) south of Auckland. Many afternoons, Tazmin and I walk down our driveway and across the highway to the beach to meet Andrew as he rides his bicycle home from work.