A new place to call home

The Neilsons are now out on their own, living it up in a cute, apartment-style flat situated behind some shops on the bustling and trendy Mt. Eden Road.   The premises are surrounded by lush palm trees and other tropical greenery.  We are on the second floor of a private apartment complex containing just 5 suites in total.  

The side of our building is covered with this lovely graffiti mural. 

And here’s Baby Shea in her new parking spot.

Our new place of residence has some special features.  Not a drinking fountain, but a bidet!  Brendon is especially stoked about this feature.  Me, a little less.  Brendon claims already that he is through with toilet paper.

The bathroom is quite large, containing both a shower and a separate bathtub.  It’s been forever since we’ve lived in a place with a bathtub, so I plan to take advantage of this feature.  The bathroom also has a heat lamp, which is a real treat.

And our apartment has a spacious, tiled balcony out front, catching some great late-afternoon sun.  Would definitely like to get a cute table and chair set to go out there.

The kitchen is also quite nice, and comes with this retro stove. 

Interestingly, people in NZ tend to drag around their fridges when they move, so this is one of many items we were needing to purchase upon moving into our place.  We found a fridge on TradeMe, an online auction site which is pretty much the equivalent of ebay meets kijiji.  When we went to pick it up, however, we discovered it was in much rougher shape than the owner had described.  The seller had failed to mention that the fridge also came with heaps of rust, mould, and cockroaches.  Yes, cockroaches.  To our misfortune, we only found this out once we got it home.  It was then that the creatures started making their appearance, crawling out of the all the little cracks and crannies within the fridge.  We were absolutely disgusted, and horrified at what we had now inherited. 

Our friend Brandon was optimistic that with a new seal, some silicone, and a good spraying of bug killer, the fridge could be salvaged, but I, along with his wife Kristen, were convinced this was a fridge that no one should own. 

I would also like to point out that this fridge came equipped with its own a “butter control” tray.  Now this is a pretty hot feature for a fridge, we know, but it was still not enough to convince us that this beast of a refrigerator would ever set foot in our home.  Surprisingly, the guy we bought the fridge from on Trademe is letting us return the fridge.  Thank goodness… otherwise, we weren’t sure how we were going to get rid of it.  I wouldn’t feel right selling it to any other human being. 

We were met with another surprise the day we moved in.  Although the carpets were supposedly industrially cleaned before we moved in, we were greatly disappointed to see that there was still a large amount of cat hair covering the carpets.  This is particularly a problem because I am quite allergic to cats.  We spent a couple of hours vacuuming and washing walls that first day, in hopes of ridding the place of as much cat dander and hair as possible.  It took some convincing, but we were finally able to get the real estate agent who had shown us the place back over to look at the situation.  She was able to confirm our speculations about the carpets in fact not being clean, and is currently working out some sort of amends to the situation.  We’re not quite sure what happened; either the carpet cleaners failed to do their job, or the place was just that filthy with cat hair before that the industrial cleaners couldn’t take care of it all.  Either way, hopefully things will be resolved soon.

This is to say that our move from East Wing to our own apartment has been full of surprises.  But we are so thankful for the help and support of good friends who let us borrow their vehicles, helped transport and move our stuff into our new place, leant us various household items, and helped us rid our place of cat hair.  It’s made the transition a lot easier, and we are so appreciative for all the help and love we’ve been given.  We are excited about living in our new place, and about the potential that it holds for some great times.