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.