A public holiday gave us another three-day weekend down at the farm, which we happily spent pottering about. Our families visited from Auckland and we delighted in showing them around. It’ll be great when the cottage is made more comfortable for visitors (not to mention ourselves), so we can have friends and family over more often. Everything is very basic at the moment. We only just upgraded our bed from an inflatable air mattress to a couple of foam mattresses pushed together, for instance. We’re making do without a fridge and a couch for the time being as well. At least we have hot running water, electricity, and a wood burner!

Having spent the Saturday and Sunday with our families we only had Monday to busy ourselves. We washed the car (wow, having the space just to do this simple task is underrated), cleaned the smoky oven that smelled like burnt pork chops, and made a start on cleaning out under the cottage. The lawn needed a mow, too, so we repaired our old push mower which had rusted over after being buried by rats in our garden shed back at our unit in the city. We gave it a thorough water-blasting, sharpened its blade with a Dremel, and then drenched it in CRC. After a few pushes it was like new. We’re not fans of lawns (too much maintenance for what they’re worth to us), but we’ll have to keep on top of the lawn around the cottage until we do some landscaping.

Whilst cleaning out under the house I discovered a pile of broken plaster board that had been buried. I dug and dug, seeing no end to the muddy heap. Along with the fragments of board I also yanked out an old folding chair, various sweet wrappers, corrugate sheets, chunks of stone and bricks, and a bunch of wooden stakes. What was it all for? Why was all this crap buried here in particular? I half expected to find a dead body that someone had gone to the trouble of concealing beneath a pile of rubble. Before long there was this gaping hole beneath the house, with yet more trash to be excavated. It seemed there was no end to it, so I stopped to think. Then it hit me…

I recalled being told that there had been a coal range in the cottage before electricity had reached the area. The cottage was built atop wooden supports, which couldn’t have held up the weight of the cast iron coal range. Then I remembered the giant concrete block that had been unceremoniously discarded near the driveway. This hole… this rubbish pit… had once been the home of that very same concrete block that had supported the weight of the coal range in the kitchen. Of course! Realising that I would have to be digging for quite some time and having nothing more appropriate to fill the hole with, I left the problem for another day…

Another mystery is these pipes that just pop out of the yard haphazardly. At first we thought they weren’t connected to anything and were merely a remnant of the water tower that stands, now tank-less and disused, above them. They were buried, so naturally we began trying to yank them out of the earth. This was foolhardy and we quickly learnt that we were being deceived. The pipes had nothing to do with the water tower at all – in fact they were connected to our water tanks! We unearthed a valve, matted with grassroots, and spun it open. The pipe gushed out fresh water. What…? Was it meant to act as a hose, or a way to purge the water tanks? We don’t know.

So… let’s just leave them alone for now, too. We have no idea how everything is connected; our entire plumbing/drainage looks like it wasn’t done professionally, just thrown together over the years. The previous owner couldn’t even tell us exactly where the septic system is. I think we’ll just take a step back from trying to fiddle with a setup that’s obviously working well enough…