Wildflowers and LOTS of bottles

The specifications are complete and the archaeological authority approved. While waiting for these we decided to sow wildflower seed to tidy up the fence line. We weren't too sure how well they would grow, the ones we put up near our house sulked for months after being hammered into the ground by hail stones. To our delight the ones at the hall have flowered profusely and look fabulous. Thank you Wildflower World for your great selections. Of course clearing the frontage has given us an insight to the amount of people who must walk home drinking. We have found beer bottles, pre-mixed drinks bottles, soft drink bottles and cans and for some inexplicable reason most of a carpet sweeper. Probably not related to the drinking. While the clearing was going on we were fortunate enough to be approached by a local company looking for storage space so while the outside was littered with used bottles the inside is now crammed with new empty bottles, stock to be personalised and distributed by the company. Handy for them to have storage close by their print factory and wonderful for us to have some rent to put towards the restoration. We're currently gathering quotes for drainage work and the old lady is looking perkier already.

Does this girl deserve to be whipped?

Well, it has been a long time since the last post but things are finally starting to happen. We received the conservation report a while ago and have a copy at the Lawrence Information Centre on Ross Place for anyone interested in reading the detailed history. It was put together by Guy Williams and is wonderfully detailed. Guy is currently working on the specifications and once we have those we can finally get started.

In the meantime we have cleared a bit of the long grass with the help of a digger, thank you Eddie!
We have also made a start on clearing the ivy but there is more to go. For this and the bramble I think we are finally going to have to succumb to using some poison. The ivy is so entwined through the rock wall there is no chance we can remove it all.

And Hiske is here helping out with a number of things and one of them is sieving the 130 year old pile of dust under the floor. She is finding a lot of wrappers, dance tickets, wallpaper and cigarette packets and a few days ago arrived home with a stamp dated 1840! That got us excited but it turned out to be a commemorative stamp from 1940 and worth about 50 cents. So that won't fund the restoration. I found out today from my father's friend Gordon that they did a lot of commemorative stamps in 1940.

Hiske has carried on sieving and her latest find is a wonderful collection of old film posters! it makes me even more determined to show films in the hall once we have it restored. We don't know the date of these but according to Gordon they are probably pre WWII. There is a Rin Tin Tin one, Ramona, and my favourite 7th Heaven says "does this girl deserve to be whipped? NO a thousand times NO!

Starting the clean up

St Patrick's was essentially empty when we bought it. In fact even the staircase to the choir loft had been removed so all that was left was a piano with half the felts damaged beyond striking a note, a black board, an old pool table with ripped felt, a cupboard, an table, a pot belly stove, and a sideboard covered in paint and with some panels providing lunch for resident borer. Over the years we added to this somewhat random collection with sofas, chairs, beds, a bathtub, a set of claw feet for the bathtub assuming we might one day have a bathroom in the building (now off the list of desired features) and some pots, pans and dishes. Basically the things you might find in a NZ crib anywhere. Then oddly, additional furniture appeared which we puzzled over and have finally decided probably came from our next door neighbour who sold his house and moved to Dunedin. We were sorry to see him go because he mowed the lawns and kept a good eye on the place for us which was extremely helpful when we were living a long way away. So now we are in clean up mode. Each week I bring a few bags of rubbish from the hall up to our house for the rubbish collection but soon I'll be down to the large stuff that will require a skip. We don't seem to have managed to stop the inward flow yet either. Earlier this month we attended a local auction of items from the Catholic Church Presbytery, interested in some church kneelers that possibly had a shared history with the hall and a few school desks that we thought would be fun to have since they tied in with the hall's history as a school. We missed out on the kneelers but did manage to buy four school desks in three different sizes. Then an old Conray heater came up, well I have always loved those heaters, big, and solid enough to sit on. I have spent almost entire Otago winters perched on a Conray. So I bid on it. And for five dollars we were the owners of the heater and also the previous lot the auctioneer threw in to get it off his books after it had been passed in. So now we can add a box of religious books to the items we need to get rid of. Anyone interested in a copy of "Why Wait for Marriage?", or "The Priest and Psychotic Personalities"?

How we got to this point

St Patrick's Church School and Hall was opened on St. Patrick's day 1872. Historic details can be found in the directory of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust and will be added to this site shortly. My part of the story started nearly 20 years ago when a weekend away from Dunedin landed me and my then husband in Lawrence. We were walking around the town and came upon this grand old building standing in the long grass with a For Sale sign pinned on it. We had no money, had no plans to buy anything, but found ourselves peering in the windows and thinking "Wouldn't it be amazing to restore a place like this?" "What an amazing building". We thought about our empty bank account, sighed and left. A few days later a friend mentioned the building and rekindled our interest. We took another look and with our friend and the help of then Credit Union Otago, we bought it. Our daughter loved it on first sight and still does. Other family and friends have had their doubts and still do. Our part owner friend left the area and we bought out her share. Then our marriage ended and I kept the building as part of the settlement. The dream of restoration continued. A new marriage started and husband Frank took on half ownership with a degree of trepedation but over time has come to love the building too. Then in the late 1990s with the economy wobbling we decided the only way we were ever going to have the time and money to put into restoration was to leave New Zealand in search of better paying work. Ten years later we are back. Living just up the road from our increasingly sad looking building, ready to finally fulfill our promise to it and to ourselves. It will be a long slow restoration on a shoestring but it is about to start. In the meantime the New Zealand Historic Places Trust has changed the building's classification from Classification II to Classification I in recognition of its significance both culturally and architecturally. This makes some funding possibly available assuming we do a good job as we certainly intend to. To kick it off, the Trust has agreed to fund a conservation plan and it is being worked on as I write this.