Ellingtons in New Zealand: Hall Closet

Do you have any part of your house that has become such a mess that you just close the door? Closing the door helps to forget about the mess, the mess that otherwise might take all day to clean out. Maybe the mess is in your hall closet, spare bedroom, or garage? Well, now image that over the years this hall closet has grown into a 500 sq. ft space. Over time the space has acquired some old things, some new things that have been outgrown, things that you love but don't have the room for anymore, and things that you dislike, but just couldn't throw away. Now, lets imagine that this hall closet is charging you rent every month, let's say around $450. What would you do? Common sense says to clean out the closet, get rid of what is not being used and move the rest of it back into the house. Oh yea, one more thing, the cost of cleaning out the closet and moving it back into the house is about the same as taking a family of 5 on a REALLY nice holiday, the kind of holiday that involves little umbrellas in drinks, down feather beds, and mimosas for breakfast. Obviously, this is not a hall closet we are dealing with but our lovely STORAGE UNIT! After the news we found out a few weeks ago, that we have to be out of our rental house in September (but just found out yesterday that we can stay), we have decided to tackle some issues head on. The main one being our stuff. Honestly, we miss it. Alright, if I was being super honest I should say that I miss it and Brad would be very happy to sell most of it and give the rest away. But, because there are two in this marriage, he understands that is not going to happen, especially if he would like to remain in a nice ,happy, loving relationship. Not only do we miss it, but we need the stuff. I have great friends that do not mind if I ask to borrow stuff, but I don't want to borrow anymore, not when I have a whole storage unit full of things waiting to be used. Air New Zealand was having a sale last week, and I did it, I bought a ticket home to tackle our stuff. The plan is to load up a 40 ft container with our belongings and ship it over. We are so looking forward to having our stuff here in NZ, I wish we would of done this from day one, but hindsight is 20/20, and I never would of imagined we would still be living here. I will have to leave behind most of our electronics, washer, dryer, re fig, and kitchen gadgets. New Zealand operates on 220-240 volts whereas the US is 110-120. So I would either blow up the appliance or myself if they are used here, so they will be staying behind. I will also have to leave behind some furniture. The fact that all of my stuff does not fit into a 40 ft container is embarrassing enough without going into to much detail. Seriously, who needs so much stuff? Obviously, I did. Yes, it is going to be expensive to bring it here, but sometimes piece of mind outweighs the dollar. The trip across the Pacific should take about 6-8 weeks, so hopefully sometime in July we will be unpacking. The funny thing is, we have no idea where we will be living in July. We are looking at buying a place, maybe renting another house, or even building. We are all over the board, as usual. What we do know is this. This little slice of heaven that we have found here on the western coast of New Zealand, is almost to good to be true. It is worth the stress and money to bring over our goods and dig our heels in a little deeper.

This was the Taranaki 6 hour adventure race. The race involved 4 stages, ranging from mtn. biking, tramping, kayaking, and running. Every stage had numerous checkpoints we had to find, no GPS's just a topo map, and compass. We had simple clues for each check point such as tree, hill top, 50m into bush. The checkpoints were circled on the topo map. Each checkpoint was worth 100 points. We had to be back within 6 hours or else every minute we were late 10 points were deducted from our overall score. We loved it, had a great time, and looking forward to the next one!