Been getting out and enjoying Wellington lately, it should be a great summer!
It’s been almost 10 months since Lisa and I brought our current house and moved in. Things are going well, having our own place and not paying a landlord is a fantastic and freeing feeling, but home ownership certainly isn’t a free ride and the amount of work it generates is quite incredible.
So what’s been happening around Carr Manor since we moved in?
Can’t beat Wellington on a good day!
Generally the house is in good shape, most of my time has been spent in the grounds of the estate clearing paths, overgrown vegetation and various other missions. However we have had a couple smaller issues with the house itself.
The most serious one is that part of the iron roof in the house was leaking due to what looks like a number of different patch jobs combined with a nice unhealthy dose of rust.
Hmm cracks in the roof that let water in == bad right?
The outside doesn’t look a whole lot better.
The “proper” fix is that this section of roof needs replacing at some point as it’s technically well-past EOL, but roof replacement is expensive and a PITA, so I’ve fixed the issue by stripped off as much rust as I could and then re-sealing the roof using Mineral Brush-On Underbody Seal.
Incase you’re wondering, yes, the same stuff that you can use on cars. It’s basically liquid tar, completely waterproof and ever so wonderful at sealing leaky roofs. I liberally applied a few cans over flashings, patches and the iron itself getting a nice thick seal.
Repair!
The same stuff did wonders on the rusted shed roof flashing as well.
Up next I need to complete a repaint of both sheds and the house roof. I’m probably going to do a small job in whatever colour I have lying around for the worst part of the roof and then go over the whole roof again at a later stage when we decide on a colour for the full repaint.
The other issue we had was that one of the window hinges had rusted out leaving us with a window that wouldn’t open/close properly.
I’m not expert, but I don’t think hinges are supposed to look like this….
This was a tricky one to fix – the hinge and the screws were so rusted out I couldn’t even remove them, in the end I removed the window simply by tearing the hinge apart when I pulled on it leaving a shower of rust and more disturbingly, cockroaches that had been living amongst the bubbled rust.
This left me with two parts of metal hinge stuck in the wall and on the window frame held in by screws that would no longer turn – or in some cases, even lacked heads entirely.
To get them out, I put a very small drill bit into the electric drill and drilled out the screw right down the middle of it. It’s pretty straightforwards once you get it going, but it was a bit tricky to get started – I ended up using the smallest bit I had to make a pilot hole/groove in the screw head, and then upsized the bit to drill in through the screw. Once done, the metal remains tend to just fall out and come out with a little prodding.
I’ve since replaced it with a shiny new hinge and stainless steel screws which should last a lot longer than their predecessors.
Shiny new hardware
Painting has been an “interesting” learning experience, I’ve found it the hardest skill to pickup since it’s just so time consuming and you have to take such extreme care to avoid dripping any paint on other surfaces.
One of my earliest painting jobs was doing the lower gate. This gate spends a lot of time in the shade and even in spring was feeling damp and waterlogged and generally wasn’t looking that sharp – especially the fact the bolt was a pile of rust barely holding together.
I’m sure unfinished timber looks great when it’s first built, but the moss dirt and damp doesn’t lead to it aging well.
Much sharper!
Things like the gate take time and need care, but it’s nothing compared to the absolute frustration of painting window frames where a few mm to the wrong side or a stray bristle leads to paint being smeared across the glass.
I did the french doors initially as the paint had peeled and was starting to expose the timber to the elements, some of the putty had even fallen out and needed replacing.
Applying painter’s tape to this is one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do :-/
Because I was painting around glass, I applied painter’s tape the whole thing before hand. It took hours, incredibly frustrating and I feel that the end result wasn’t particularly great.
I’ve since found that I can get a pretty tidy result using a sash/trim brush and taking extreme care not to bump the glass, but it is tricky and mistakes do happen. I’m figuring with enough practice I’ll get better at windows… and I have plenty of practice waiting for me with a full house paint job pending. Of course I could pay someone to do it, but at $15k+ for a re-paint, I’m pretty keen to see if I can tackle it myself….
The shed works haven’t proceeded much – I had the noble goal of completely repairing it over summer, but that time just varnished sorting out various other bits and pieces.
On the plus side, thanks to help from one of my colleagues, the shed has been dug out from it’s previously buried state and the rot and damage exposed – next step is to tear off the rotten weatherboards and doors and replace them with new ones, before repainting the whole shed.
A small 1meter retaining wall would have been more than enough to protect the shed, but instead the earth has ended up piled around it causing it to rot and collapse.
I also had help from dad and toppled the mid-size trees that were in-between the shed and the path. Not only were they blocking out light, but they were also going to be a clear issue to shed and path integrity in the future as they got bigger.
Much tidier! Just need to fix the shed itself now…
I’m still really keen to get this shed fixed so intend to make a start on measuring and sourcing the timber soon(ish) and maybe taking a few days off work to line up a block of time to really attack and fix it up.
A more pressing issue has been our pathways. We have two long 30-40meter concrete paths, a long ramped one (around 20-30 degree slope) up to the upper street and carpad and another zig-zag path with a mix of ramps and steps heading down to the lower street where the bus stop is.
Both paths are not in the best condition. The lower one requires a complete replacement, it’s probably around 80 years old and the non-reinforced concrete has cracked and shifted all over the place.
The upper one is more structurally intact, but has it’s own share of issues. The first most serious issue is that the steeper upmost end gets incredibly slippery in winter. It seems that although the concrete has been brush-finished whenever it rains, any grip it had just vanishes and it basically becomes a slide.
Jethro vs Autumn
Naturally slipping to a broken/leg/face/life isn’t ideal and we’ve been looking at options to fix it. We could convert the steepest bit from a ramp to steps, but steps have their own safety issues and we aren’t keen the lose the ramp as it’s the best way for getting large/heavy items to/from the house.
So a couple months ago I put down some Resene Non-slip Deck & Path which is a tough non-slippery paint product that basically includes a whole heap of sand which turns the smooth concrete path into something more like fine sandpaper.
We weren’t too sure about how good it would be, so we put down a 0.5l strip to test it out on the worst most part of the path.
A/B Testing IRL
It doesn’t feel that different to brushed concrete in the dry, but in the wet the difference is night & day and you really do feel a bit more attached to the path. We’ll still need to invest in a decent handrail and fence, but this goes a long way towards an elegant fix.
I’ve since brought another 10l and painted the upper portion, essentially all the “good” concrete we have. I thought that it might be too dark but actually it looks very sharp and once we put a new fence up (maybe white picket?) it will look very clean and tidy.
Old concrete, as good as new! :-)
The other ~30meters down to the house isn’t in such good shape, the surface is quite uneven in places and it’s missing chunks. We have a project to do to repair or replace the rest of it, once done the intention will be to paint the rest of the path in the same colour and it should look and feel great.
All this work requires a fair few tools, I’ve finally clean up the dining room where they had been accumulating and they’re now living properly in the shed.
Shed
One of the most interesting lessons I’ve had so far is that buying decent tools is often far cheaper than hiring tradies to do something for you – generally tools are cheap, even decent ones, but labour is incredibly expensive.
Why yes, that is a hardwood lamppost that I’m chainsawing.
The same thing applies to parts, it’s generally cheaper to just buy a new replacement of something than it is to fix it – I’m used to this from the IT world, but didn’t expect it from IRL.
In our cases, we had a shower mixer that decided to start letting a constant small stream of water through rather than shutting off properly.
Jethro vs Shower
Taking it apart and even removing it from the wall entirely isn’t too tricky, but I found after removing it all that the issue wasn’t anything trivial like needing a new o-ring and had to call out the plumbers.
Plumbers took it out, look at and it and are all “yeah that needs a new part”, so I ended up paying for the part + the labour – I’d have been better off just buying the whole new part myself and fitting it rather than trying to fix it.
Never underestimate the amount of waste you produce moving into a new place. I filled a skip with 1/3 concrete rubble, 1/3 polystyrene and 1/3 misc waste and there’s still another skip worth of debris around the property, possibly more once I tear all the rotten timber out of the shed.
Polystyrene is my number one enemy right now, almost everything we had shipped to the house when we moved in came with some and it’s crumbly and completely non-recyclable for good measure >:-(.
Where did all this junk come from?
Finally on the inside of the house things haven’t progressed much. Lisa has been working on the interior decor and accessories whilst I’ve done exciting things like overseeing the installation of insulation and fixing the loo in the laundry. :-/
Warming sheep fluff!
I hate plumbing!
I also had a whole bunch of fun with the locks – when we moved in I had the locksmith change the tumblers, but we’ve since found the locks were pretty worn out and the tail pieces inside started failing, so I had to buy whole new locks and fit them.
Turns out, whole new locks is way cheaper than getting the locksmith out to change the tumblers. If you’re moving into an older place, I’d recommend consider just getting new locks instead since the old ones probably aren’t much good either.
The only downside is that the sizing was slightly different, so I had to do some “creative woodwork” using a drill bit as a file (I didn’t have a file…. or the right size drill bit. A bit dodgy, but worked out OK).
It’s not just the IT world where the lack of standards means a bit of hackery to make stuff function.
Tidy job at the end of the day!
A lot of this work has been annoying in that it’s not directly visible as an improvement, but it’s all been important stuff that needed doing. I’m hoping to spend the next few months getting stuck into some of the bigger improvements like fixing the paths, sheds, etc which will be a lot more visible.
Until then, need to make more evenings to just sit back, relax and enjoy having our own place – feels like I’ve been just far too busy lately.
Beer time
This blog has been a little quiet lately, mostly thanks to Lisa and I being busy adjusting to the joys of home ownership with our new house we moved into in mid-September!
I’m a trust worthy reputable resident of Wadestown now!
It’s been pretty flat-out and a number of weeks have already passed us by very quickly – we had anticipated the increase in expenditure that comes with owning a properly, but the amount of time it consumes as well is quite incredible, and given that the property hasn’t had a whole lot of love for the past 5 years or so, there’s certainly a backlog of tasks that need doing.
There’s also the unexpected “joys” that come with ownership, like the burst waterpipe on our first day in the new house, or the one hob on the cooker that appears to like leaking gas when it’s used, or the front door lock that has broken after a few weeks of use. For the first time ever, I almost miss having a landlord to complain to – however the enjoyment of putting a power drill through your first wall without requiring permission cannot be understated either.
Amusingly despite becoming home owners, it’s actually been the outdoors that’s been occupying most of my time, with large masses of plant life that has crept over the sheds, the paths and into roof gutters. I cleared 8 wheelbarrows of soil and plant material off the upper path the other day and it’s barely made a dent.
Rediscovering the lower pathway slowly…
So far I’ve been mostly concerned about the low level plants, I haven’t even begun to look at the wall of trees and ferns around us – a lot of them are great and we will keep them, but a few certainly need some pruning back to make them a bit tamer and let a bit more light into the property.
Ferns in the mist. Pretty kiwi as bru.
I’ve been discovering the awesome range of power tools that exist these days – seems tools have come a long way from the days of my fathers wired drill, I’ve now got drills, sanders and even a weedeater/line cutter which all share the same cordless battery pack!
Got 99 problems but wires ain’t one. Cordless freedom baby!
I’ve had to learn some new skills like how to use a saw or how to set a post in the ground. Of course I cheated a bit by using ready-to-pour fastcrete, but hey, I’m lazy Gen Y-er who wants the fastest easiest way to make something work. ;-)
Harder than it looks. Stupid solid clay ground :-(
I also have two sheds that I need to do up – the first is in pretty good shape and just needs some minor fixes and paint job. It’s even got power already wired up so you can plug in your tools and go :-)
The second shed is in a far worse state and pretty much needs complete stripping down and repairing including a whole new floor and getting rid of almost a meter high pile of detritus that has collected around the back of it over the past 100 years. Helpfully some trees also decided to then plant themselves and grow right next to it as well.
The older shed and upper pathway after tidying up the over growth.
The house is thankfully in a better state than the garden and sheds, although there is certainly a lot of work needed in the form of overdue maintenance and improvements. The house was built in 1914 (100 years birthday this year!), but thankfully despite the age of the property, the hardest and most essential modernisation has been done for us already.
There’s been a complete replacement of electrical systems with modern cabling and both the structure and interior is in good shape with the original Totara piles having been replaced and whatever scrim wall linings that previous existed having been replaced with plasterboard.
Most of the interior decor is playing it safe with neutral coloured walls, carpet and curtains and the native timber exposed on the doors and skirting. However there are a few garish items remaining from an earlier era where style wasn’t as important, like the lovely maroon tiled fireplace or the cork flooring in the kitchen :-/
The Lounge: Where 2014 meets with 1970 head on.
Generally the property is nice and everyone who comes over describes it as lovely – but of course nobody tells you if your baby is ugly, so it’s entirely possible everyone is questioning our tastes behind our backs… But give it time, we have a lot of plans for this place that are yet to be actioned!
Our primary task right now is dragging our 20th century house into the 21st century with a few modern requirements like data cabling, heating and decent lighting.
Oddly enough I’ve already started on the data side of things, getting Cat6 ethernet cable run through the house to all the living spaces and roof mounting a WiFi AP and installing a proper comms cabinet. Priorities!
The next major issue is heating, the house has an old wood fire and old unflued gas heater, both of which look pretty dubious. We’ve left them alone and have been using a few recently installed panel heaters, but we need to consider a more powerful whole-house solution like a modern gas fireplace to handle the cold Wellington winters.
Power drills! Holes in walls! This is what home ownership is all about.
In addition to heaters, we also need to fix up the shocking lack of insulation that is common with New Zealand properties. Whilst we have roof insulation already, the floor needs insulating and at some point there is going to be a very expensive retro-fit double glazing cost we need to investigate as well.
Aside from these immediate priorities, there’s the question of changes to the layout. The biggest annoyance for us right now is that the kitchen/dining space and the lounge are two separate rooms with a bedroom in-between, which doesn’t really suit modern open plan living so we are pondering the cost of knocking out a wall and re-arranging things to create a single open plan living area.
Additionally we have a really small bathroom yet we have a massive laundry that’s about twice the size just through the wall. Considering the the laundry has almost nothing but a single lonely washing machine in it, it’s a prime candidate for being annexed for a new role as a massive new bathroom.
The tiny “wooden cabin” bathroom. If it wasn’t for the skylight and our character 12 foot ceilings, it would be really dark and tiny in there. :-/
We are also thinking about how we can improve the outdoor area which is a bit weirdly organised with a large patio area detached from the house and the back deck being a tiny strip that can’t really fit much. We’re already pondering extending the deck out further, then along the full length of the house, so we can join up with the lower patio and make it a nore usable space.
World’s tiniest deck, not exactly that useful…
Of course all these improvements require a fair bit of capital, which is one thing we don’t have much of right now thanks to the home loan, so its going to take some careful budgeting and time to get to where we want to be. For now, we are just enjoying having the place and plotting…..
Aside from the garden and sorting out house improvements, the other major time sink has been unpacking. We didn’t exactly have heaps of stuff given that we just had limited bits stored at each other’s parent’s houses, so it’s pretty scary at how much has emerged and arrived at our new house. I think everyone was kind of glad to get our junk out of their houses at long last, although I’m sure my parents will miss the file server buzzing away 24×7.
It’s been a bit of a discovery of lots of stuff we didn’t realise we had, I have literally a small data center worth of tech gear including rackmount PDUs, routers, switches and other items.
I know what you’re thinking “Oh how typical of Jethro, boobs on a box” – but this one ISN’T MINE, it came out of Lisa’s parents house which kind of disturbs me deeply.
This is probably the biggest negative of home ownership for me – I hate owning stuff. And owning a house is a sure way to accumulate stuff very, very quickly.
Owning a house means you have space to just “store that in the cupboard for now”. Being a couple in a large 4 bedroom home means there’s a lot of space and little pressure to use it, so it’s very easy for us to end up with piles of junk that actually doesn’t serve a purpose and not feel forced to clean it out.
I came back from AU with two suitcases and I could probably have culled that down to as little as one suitcase given the chance. There’s a huge amount of tech gear I’m considering offloading and Lisa has a massive pile of childhood stuff to make some hard decisions about, because as hard as it is to get rid of things, I think both of us are keen to avoid ending up in the same hording situation like our parents.
Of course some stuff can’t be avoided. I’ve spent a small fortune at Bunnings recently obtaining tools and materials to do repairs and other DIY for the house, so there’s a lot of additions to the “stuff I have to own but hate having to own” pile.
We also needed to purchase all new furniture since we had essentially nothing after returning from Sydney. I don’t mind buying a few quality pieces, but sadly it seems impossible to buy a house load of furniture without also obtaining an entire shed worth of cardboard and polystyrene packaging that we need to dispose of. Sorry environment! :-(
Trapped by packaging.
We’ve gotten through most of the unpacking, but there’s still a lot of sorting and finding homes for things left to do.
I’m looking forwards to getting to the point where I can just enjoy the house and the space we have. It should be fantastic during summer especially for entertaining guests with its large backyard, patio and sunny afternoons and I’m really looking forwards to having a proper home office setup again for my geeking needs
Got my home office! If only I had money for computer upgrades left :-(
So that’s an update on where we are at for now. It’s going to be a busy year I think with a lot of time spent doing up the place, and I’ll have plenty more blog posts to come on the various adventures along the way. I suspect many of them are going to be quite low-tech compared to the usual content of this blog, but maybe I’ll wake up and suddenly decide that home automation is an immediate vital task I need to complete. ;-)
If you want some more pictures of the house, there’s a copy of all the real estate agent listing photos on my Pinterest account taken by an actual competent photographer, the plan is to try and take pictures along the way as we progress with our improvements to the property to see the progress we’ve been making.
Whilst a famous tourist location, I’m not a huge fan of Bondi Beach – probably primarily due to it being a victim of it’s own success and being overrun by annoying tourists like myself. ;-)
However Bondi isn’t only just a beach, it’s the start of a walkway leading along the coast and down to Coogee and back. The walk winds along the coast, often along the edge of cliffs and through various quieter coves. It’s a nice escape from Sydney city and suburbs and for a short time you can forget you live in a massive sprawling city.
Looking back at Bondi beach.
Mmmm real waves, none of this calm harbour crap
Winter Sydney is a lovely and mild climate, particularly on this overcast and windy day – definitely the best time of the year to go for walking adventures, especially if you’re a manly kiwi who doesn’t think 10 degrees is cold.
For details about the walk, take a look at this site. I found it was easy enough to get the train to Bondi station and then walk to Bondi beach as a warmup instead of waiting around for a bus and it saves a few dollars on the trip cost as well.
Since living in Sydney, I’ve been out to Manly a couple times, including for a walk around the North Head trails which showcase some of Australia’s military history and fortifications.
Manly has a lot going for it, offering great beaches, walking trails and a strong ecosystem of different shops and food venues. And with easy access from Circular Quay via a scenic 30minute ferry ride, it’s a great day outing for me, especially since Circular Quay is only a 20min walk from my flat.
One thing I have noticed on my ferry trips out to Manly, is that there’s a lot of scenic bush and bays all along the North Sydney coast time from the Sydney Harbour Bridge right out to Manly. I therefore decided to make Sydney CBD to Manly my next walking adventure in Sydney.
Of course, those readers familiar with Sydney will say – “but Jethro, that’s nuts, Manly is miles away!”. Well dear reader, I can confirm for you – Manly is a painstaking 30.04km pain-inducing death-march from Sydney CBD, and I even have the GPS trail for you to follow if you wish to re-create this pain in your own life. :-)
View Walk from Sydney CBD to Spit Point Bridge in a larger map
It’s an extremely interesting walk, along the way you pass through opulent suburbs, the back of Sydney Zoo, numerous coves and beaches, a number of hills, bush, WW2 fortifications and two major bridges.
Please excuse the line breakage on the map – Google Track didn’t handle some GPS plot absences particular well, I’ve touched up as best as I can, but couldn’t figure out a way to connect segmented lines. There’s also the period from Spit Point Bridge to Manly itself where my phone battery died, so I’ve drawn in the lines to a mostly-accurate level, but it messes with the total distance stats reported and leaves some weird graphic artefacts.
It’s best viewed in the full Google Maps interface – I’ve tagged certain areas of interest, it’s also worth noting the location of Ferry docks, since there’s a number of good attractions that you may wish to ferry out directly to go and see.
I took a few photos along the way – the trip is very scenic, I really need to go back with a DSLR as I came across heaps of different things I would have loved to capture in a better level of quality.
Sadly Lisa didn’t want to join me on this walk for some strange reason, so you’ll have only pictures of pained geek and scenary, rather than any actual eye candy from my trip photos:
Full of optimism, I set forth from my apartment with my trust RedHat t-shirt to bring geek culture to the bush.
The first stage of the walk is through Sydney CBD and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge – I have plenty of photos from a previous walk across if you’re interested. The bridge is always an interesting stroll and only takes a couple minutes offering amazing views the whole time.
Once off the bridge in Milsons Point, the walk took me through the suburbs and coves directly around North Sydney. The area is certainly wealthy, but there’s odd pockets of housing or apartments that appear otherwise.
The whole route is littered with small coves and marinas like this one.
Looking out back towards Sydney
Amusingly odd to have man made items pushing their way through the path, rather than tree roots.
The walk through these suburbs is nice enough, but the real gold starts once the beach and coastline tracks start, these offer a much desired escape from the city noise and people and some amazing views of the harbour and Sydney itself.
City looks pretty far away already!
The walkways that have been installed behind the Sydney Zoo are particularly good, these paths are well formed and often form wooden stairs and walkways for a good few KM of coastline.
Walking out behind Sydney Zoo towards the ferry dock.
Thankfully the day was overcast and only low 20s, otherwise I’d be looking a lot worse for wear.
A number of trees along the route with this weird base hollowing.
Also a number of trees with this weird growth on them – seems to be too many for them to be beehives… dropbear nests?
Weird bark stripped trees – came around many of these, the trees have all their bark stripped off and lying around them – unsure as to why.
Halfway between the Sydney Zoo and Chowder Bay where the well built Zoo trail ends, there’s Bradley Head, an area of parkland with a small lighthouse and the distinctive tripod mast from the original HMAS Sydney WW1 era ship.
Mast from the HMAS Sydney (1912) WW1 era ship at Bradley’s Head.
Following the coast around from Bradley’s Head and through Chowder Bay, leads to Middle Head, home of the Middle Head Fortifications that guarded Sydney Harbour. With direct line of sight to any ships attempting to pass through Sydney Harbour, it offered an ideal defensive location, featuring both cannon and disappearing guns – similar to the ones in Devonport NZ, however there’s no longer any guns located at Middle Head.
View out from Middle Head towards Sydney Heads, the entrance to Sydney Harbour.
Old fortifications: everyone loves lying around in them with a balloon tied to their body.
Unsure if this was a half-assed demolition job, or whether the building broke apart over the years.
Geek, with exercise add-on. At this stage I was feeling a little tired, but still needed to head down to Hunters Bay, and then back up a big hill before I could then go down across Spit Point Bridge.
There’s quite a bit of stuff to explore out at Middle Head, it’s something that I’ll have to make another visit to in future to properly explore – there’s no quick ferry route to Middle Head, closest terminals appear to be either the zoo dock, which will require a few more KM of (pleasant) walking.
Walking down towards Spit Bridge. Just about every cove I see has a marina situated in it, must be almost as many boats as cars in Sydney.
The walk along Spit Rd to the Spit Bridge isn’t particularly great, as it’s a main road (2x 2-lanes roads) the way down, so this section of walk has all the charms of walking alongside a motorway, however it’s the only way across (short of swimming).
Spit Point Bridge! I just managed to run across as the lights were flashing before it started lifting.
I fucking love bridges!
Around this time my phone decided it didn’t want to handle more than 4 hours doing GPS track plotting and died, so the remainder of my walk to Manly has been drawn in manually on the Google Map above.
There is a coastal route the whole way from Spit Point Bridge to Manly, at about 10km. Having already done 22km by this stage and it getting late, I decided to cut back across some of the suburbs, rather than finding my way though the unfamiliar suburbs and do a shorter 7km trip.
In hindsight I should have continued up Spit Rd and onto Sydney Rd, taking the coast path part of the way made the walk back up to join Sydney Rd longer and harder than it needed to be.
Pain, oh god the pain. In some ways it was good that my phone died, so that pictures of me looking even worse couldn’t be taken.
I’m keen to do the proper Spit Bridge to Manly walk, so maybe I’ll make that segment a separate trip one day, or if I’m ever crazy enough, re-try the walk starting from Manly and walking back to the city.
I eventually made it into Manly, rapidly devouring an iced bun (mmm delicious 2000+ kJ energy) and a coke, the champion feed of any athlete (I was out of muesli bars ok!!) and got the ferry back to Circular Quay.
Being able to sit at the stern of the ferry and see all the coves I had walked around during the 30mins ferry journey back was actually incredibly relaxing, certainly a good ending to the trip. The only problem is that the half hour break in walking meant that my body started cooling down and it was not pleasant getting moving once back at Circular Quay.
I managed to strain one of my ankles slightly – the rest of me hurts like crazy, but in the usual exercise way, so it should come right in the next couple of days.
General stats from the trip – I averaged 5.21km/h walking speed – my actual walking speed is more around 5.9km/h, I suspect time spent looking at sights and suburban traffic lights messed with those stats somewhat.
The total distance was 30.5km (some GPS measurement inaccuracies in that of course) – if I was able to keep that rate up daily, I would be able to walk from Wellington to Auckland in one month (of course reality is that there is a lot more time needed for breaks, detors, difficult terrain, etc).
I’d certainly recommend parts of this walk to anyone interested – however you have to be fucking nuts to do the whole thing like I did – I’m still hobbling around my apartment like an old man in pain.
Seeing as I’m living in Sydney, I felt compelled to head out to visit Bondi Beach – it’s a pretty famous location, so figured it’s worth getting out there to check it out at least once.
All set up for a day at the beach, geek style!
Getting out to Bondi is a bit of a mission, since unfortunately the rail link doesn’t go the whole way – instead you catch the train to Bondi Junction, and then switch to bus in order to get to the beach.
You can buy a (pricey) ticket at any of the city train station machines that includes both the train and bus fare – costing about $8.80 return at an off-peak time.
The bus is the worst part of the trip, in future I’ll probably consider just walking it as it’s only 3.2km from the railway station – whilst the buses *do* have air con, any benefits are lost with the squeeze with numerous tourists squished into it, personally I’d rather be hot outside than hot squeezed into a metal tin with random strangers….
Bondi Beach. It has sand. Waves. Usual beach things really.
People are really the biggest issue with Bondi – it’s a nice beach in it’s own right, but the volume of tourists and shops around it kind of ruins the enjoyment somewhat, particularly when combined with the transport hassles. In summer the crowds can be massive, as much as 30 thousand+ – and it’s not a particularly large beach really.
The smaller beaches in walking distance to the south like Tarramara and Bronte look more appealing if you’re more of an introverted type, or take the ferry over to Manly for some of the nice beaches over there.
If you’re a tourist on holiday, you’re probably better off spending your time in Sydney to explore the city and waterfront and save the beach trips for when visiting Brisbane’s gold coast.
Having said that, if you’re in Sydney and don’t mind lots of people, it’s a nice beach and looks great for swimming and surfing, plus it’s well patrolled by surf life savers.
One of the perks of Bondi Beach is being able to meet pretty ladies. Although they won’t always appreciate you taking pictures of them. ;-)
Aside from the beach, there are a large number of eateries along the beach and in the surrounding streets – (like Funky Pies for some delicious vegetarian/vegan goodness), as well as a walk up over the rocky cliffs.
Walkway from the southern end of Bondi Beach.
Looking back at Bondi
It was worth the visit, but I don’t think Bondi will become one of my regular visited locations, the transport hassles make it a bit difficult to get there – it’s easier for me to get out to Manly on the ferry than it is to get to Bondi on the train/bus.
It would be a different story if living locally or having a private transport option- some of my colleagues at work get there by bike which seems to work quite well for them.
Occasionally I have to touch Microsoft software, thankfully most of our customers have their licenses entered into the Volume Licensing Service Center these days which makes finding the install media a lot easier than rummaging through CD wallets in the office.
The volume license center isn’t perfect by a long shot but for the most part it’s a pretty effective way of getting keys and software downloads for purchased software [1], with the glaring exception of a major defect with the download functionality:
So close, yet so far
The download interface helpfully gives you some advice to use a download manager – because lets face it, browser downloaders suck universally – Firefox, Chrome and IE all have poor quality download functionality.
However by download manager, Microsoft actually mean “some Microsoft application you should download and run to download the file”. I’ve *never* had a good experience with vendor download managers, not to mention the fact I’m wanting to download this file to a GUI-less Linux KVM host, so this option is right out.
The next logical option is to download with the browser and just grab the download URL – however as shown above, clicking the download button won’t provide a real URL it instead runs a bit of javascript which then directs the browser to the actual download URL.
It’s not uncommon behavior, but it’s damn annoying – browsers know how to download a file, you don’t need javascript to make it happen and it breaks the ability to copy and paste the link directly into a download manager.
When annoying companies use javascript to obfuscate the download URL, the next trick is to start the download with the browser, then go to the download window and copy the real URL out from there.
However, this still fails:
Thou shalt not pass!
Looks like Microsoft is doing some clever checks, possibly with cookies, user agent and IP, or some combination of all of above and refuses the download manager you’ve chosen. >:-(
With a bit of digging around it would be possible to make a solution to work around this, but it’s a major PITA that they do all this pointless obfuscation and I don’t know if I do enough downloads from there to justify the effort to find and make a proper solution to work around Microsoft’s failings.
What really annoys me, is that I’ve already BROUGHT the product and you need a license key in order to EVEN USE IT after you’ve downloaded – it’s not like someone else is going to figure out the randomly generated download path for my session, download the ISO and somehow get a free copy of Windows Server….
I can go to The Pirate Bay and download Microsoft ISOs in a matter of minutes, there’s no point trying to restrict the download ability of your paying customers, the ISOs are already shared – usually pre-hacked to remove activation.
The result is needing to download the ISO over a DSL line to my workstation and upload it back over that same DSL line (oh god the slowness) to get it to the customer’s server, something which is extremely annoying and wasteful for my data cap.
I wish Microsoft would just make their ISO archive available for download off FTP already. :-(
[1] As a side note, I really, really wish I could just buy MS software online via this center and be done without having to deal with NZ’s resellers who don’t add any value, just overhead to purchasing this stuff.
On my recent walk to Devonport I was amazed at the design of the cycle lanes made by the North Shore City Council (now part of the amalgamated Auckland City Council).
Aside from the initial amazement that such a car-focused city knew what cycle lanes where, I was also extremely amused to see how exactly they chose to implement them….
Exhibit A: The flipped cycleway.
Having a standard such as “people to the left, bikes to the right” clearly wasn’t exciting enough, so let’s have bike and pedestrian lanes randomly swapping sides at each junction.
Quick everyone, change places!
Exhibit B: Multipathing!
Having just one bike lane isn’t enough, let’s add a second bike lane – one on the footpath and one on the road. And whilst we’re at it, let’s make it so it goes bike, pedestrian and then bike again. :-/
Pedestrians: Cyclist sandwich filling.
Not pictured are the other great cycle designs I came across on my wander including:
Whilst it’s great to see a council working to lay some cycle lanes, the lack of thought around planning and standardization of the lanes is a source of great amusement, but also a potential risk to both cyclists and pedestrians if these lanes start getting used more heavily.
When I was in Wellington last month I caught up with my good mate Tom (of #geekflat fame) and we decided to go for a wander up Mt Kaukau with Tom’s friend Nicola.
I spent most of my years in Wellington focusing on the CBD and southwards, so Johnsonville, Khandallah and it’s surrounding walks are quite new to me.
We took the route up from Johnsonville, going up to the peak and then back down into Khandallah side, before walking back through the suburbs, near the rail line, to Johnsonville.
The Wellington City Council has a good map of the Northern Walks available for download showing the route, I also quickly whipped up a rough Google map of the start & exit points I took along with the route diagram. I should really record more GPS accurate tracks with my phone, but that stuff loves chewing up the battery quickly so not always possible.
Starting out climb up....
It's a @macropiper! By a tunnel! (Turns out this tunnel is for the old water reservoir pipe).
TV transmission tower in the distance - it's visible clearly down on street level in Johnsonville and looks a long way away from there - not really too hard getting there though.
It's Welly! So pretty!
Uh-oh, what has Tom found?
Not a kitteh!
Will these landmark TV transmission towers still be relevant in 25 years time after everything has been replaced with IP over fibre?
I love this city!
Wellington suburbs lapping at the foothills.
Harbour view, love the trail of the turning cargo ship.
Panorama view over the harbour, CBD, surburbs and out towards Makara in the far right. Not very visable is the large wind farm out that way. Pictures don't really do the view from up here justice.
Anyone know what this weird tree is?
Johnsonville rail line
It was a pretty good walk all up, not to long or taxing, but with a rewarding view and an excuse to wander through the suburbs for the first time.
We came across a few promising looking cafes hidden in weird places in the suburbs whilst on the return walk, if I have more time in Wellington again soon I wouldn’t mind checking a few of them out, particularly one which was busy pulling home made pies out of the oven….
If you take a look at the council map for the Northern Walkway, it’s actually possible to walk all the way from Johnsonville to the Botanic gardens, staying mostly in parks with a few detors through streets. This route is also part of the Te Araroa walk, so good practice for me for when I’m ready to do it. :-)
Working from home for the past 7+ months has left me with strong urges to get out and about on the weekends, least I go crazy from being coped up inside – whilst my inner geek urges to sit infront of my laptop and code are strong, getting outside for a walk, seeing new places and new people always puts me in a better mind set for when I get home to do a large coding session in the evening afterwards. ;-)
The last two weekends I’ve done the Takapuna to Devonport (Green Route) walk, a pathway I discovered purely by chance whilst walking to Devonport along the main road route due to an entrance onto a park just at the start of the memorial WW2 tree-lined road half-way in my journey.
It takes you through a number of parks that I didn’t even know existed, over the marsh lands and through some of the older streets towards Devonport with characteristic turn of the century houses (Devonport being established as a suburb around 1840 and one of Auckland’s older suburbs).
There’s a handy map you can download from the council here and the whole route is walk & cycle safe. It’s certainly the better route to take, the road route between Takapuna and Devonport should be avoided at all costs, considering it’s always congested and overloaded with traffic, as there is only one road route from Devonport all the way up to Takapuna in order to get onto the motorway.
Having made the mistake of trying to drive to Devonport once before, I’d avoid it at all costs, you’d get from Devonport to Takapuna faster by taking the ferry to Britomart and bus from there IMHO, nose-to-tail traffic the whole way on a Sunday evening isn’t that fun, not to mention a nightmare finding car parking in Devonport itself.
Traffic backed up from the Esmond Rd - Lake Rd junction. It's like this for a good suburb or two, even on weekends. :-/
The sane way for non-car loving Aucklanders to get around.
The route signage is pretty good, although I found that whilst Devonport-to-Takapuna was almost perfect in directional signage, the Takapuna-to-Devonport approach has a few bits that are a little confusing if you hadn’t done it the other way first.
There’s also a complete nightmare in terms of cycle vs pedestrian marking, something that the North Shore City Council loves doing, such as alternating conventions of left vs right side for cyclists – something I’ll cover in a future post. :-/
The route doesn’t seem particularly busy, most of the activity I saw was with people in the various parks the route crosses through, rather than others completing the same route as me – I expect the length detours them a bit (took me around 1.5hrs).
Starting from Takapuna/Esmond road, the route is firstly though the newer suburbs of Takapuna, with a weird suburban/industrial mix of some lovely power pylons running along the street.
Ah, the serenity! :-D
TBH, Takapuna suburbs bore me senseless, they’re a giant collection of 1970s-2012 housing projects, very American-dream type feel at times. Thankfully one soon escapes to the parks and walkways along the marshy coast.
Marshy land, Auckland Harbour bridge in the distance.
One of several boardwalks so you won't get your feet/wheels muddy - unless you want to. :-)
Long bridge is long! (kind of reminds me of Crash Bandicot's Road to Nowhere). If the ground is dry, you could brave cycling alongside it through the marsh, few tracks suggesting this is somewhat popular.
The route slowly starts getting more parks and greenery, with small intermissions of going back along suburb streets, before rejoining more natural routes.
Got a skateboard? And a hoodie? This is the place for you to hang in this otherwise quite empty grassy field called a park.
/home/devonport_residents/.Trash/ (that's a recycling bin joke for you windows users!)
Once you come out of the park, you end up walking through a few blocks of Devonport’s residential area, before coming out onto the main street and along to the shopping and cafe area.
An old church, where Aucklanders worship their god "Automobile".
I quite like Devonport, it has a good number of cafes, bars, the waterfront, classic architecture (not bland corporate crap like Takapuna) and generally has charm.
If I was going to live in Auckland long term, I’d seriously consider Devonport as a good place to have house, I’d even consider not bothering with a car, depending on the availability of a good close supermarket.
Of course this assumes working in the CBD or from home, so you can just take the ferry into the CBD, rather than needing to mess around with commuting up to the motorway and into the city everyday. If a car-based commute is vital, you might want to do Devonport a favor and go live in a less classy suburb with closer motorway access.
Knitted handrails! This place has style!
Vertical water accelerator.
I stopped for a coffee at one of the several cafes around the main street with an outside area and was pleasantly surprised for a change – I didn’t even see a Starbucks there!
The local residential population appears to have a lot of members of the baby boomer generation and either residential or visiting families attracted to the parks and waterfront.
As I was there, I decided to make the short climb up Mt Victoria (*curses settlers who named about 50 million places in NZ Mt Victoria*) and get a good look out over the area. In typical Auckland fashion, it is entirely possible to drive right up to the top, or take a segway tour, but despite the name it’s really just a medium sized hill, nothing compared to Wellington stuff.
Looking out towards Okahu & Mission Bay. Start to get an idea why Auckland is the "City of Sails".
Our old friend Rangitoto island again. Incidentally, Mt Victoria itself is also a volcano, just not anywhere nearly as large.
Looking out over houses towards North Head,
Auckland CBD
Panorama out towards Rangitoto
Panorama showing Auckland CBD on left, Devonport centre and Takapuna in the horizon on the right.
I didn’t know anything about it other than it was a big hill, so damn I was going to climb and conquer that, but it turns out it was part of Auckland’s early military history with a large disappearing gun (BL 8 inch Mk VII naval gun) which was installed in 1899, well before WW2 – seems NZ has a number of good examples of these interesting pre-WW1 weapons.
The magical disappearing cannon!
Fuck being the poor suckers who had to lug this all the way up the hill. :-/
Mushroom vents hint to a large underground complex - sadly closed to the public.
One thing I missed is the other large hill in the area – North Head – which offers a much larger selection of 1800’s – WW2 relics including tunnels and additional guns which are open to the public.
Devonport has had a long military history and is where the main naval base of New Zealand, dating back to 1841, usually has a couple ships berthed to look at – or sometimes coming/going offering some neat photo opportunities.
I tend to find that Auckland really hides it’s interesting stuff, I lived in Takapuna for months before I discovered the existence of many of these interesting walkways and sights, in many cases they just aren’t advertised and from a distance, you don’t get an idea of how interesting some of these places can be. (Mt Victoria and North Head look just like plain hills with some sheds on them from sea level).
That’s why I love exploring on foot, find so many gems, look them up online, find another 5 related ones to go and check out. :-) And don’t be afraid to take random interesting looking paths to see where they lead, it’s how I find many places – including many of Wellington’s paths and walkways.
After the trip up Mt Victoria, I wandered back down and along the waterfront – turns out it’s a fantastic place to get close up shots of any large ships passing by.
Rena-sized cargo ship, gives an idea how massively large these things are when seeing up close. See the little speedboat to the right for an idea of the size difference. :-D
I ended up heading to the ferry terminal to get the ferry over to Britomart to catch up with friends, only took less than 15mins to board and cross over the harbor for $6. (frequent traveler discounts available).
This is Fuller Ferry, requesting Devenport wharf command center to lower defence grid for safe docking.
Cruising in to the Britomart ferry terminal, past the Rugby Word Cup "Cloud" event center.
Finally wrapped up the day with a delicious coffee and snack at my much loved Shakey Isles before they closed (closing time is 17:00 on weekends FYI).
Om nom nom (totally not addicted to chocolate)
If you don’t live in Takapuna and want to reproduce this walk, I’d recommend taking the Northern Express (NEX) bus to Akoranga Station, or the normal Takapuna buses to the shopping center, doing the walk to Devonport and then ferry back into Britomart.
It’s an easy day trip and could be as short as 3-4 hrs or as long as an entire day depending what sights and coffee you decide to partake in whilst at Devonport.
The other approach is to do Takapuna – Devonport & return, something that might appeal particularly if wanting to do it by bike rather than foot, there’s a bit more parking around Takapuna, particular Fred Thomas drive area near Akaranga Station to drive to with your bikes.