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.