Wakefield New Zealand

Our new home town  is slightly smaller than Nafferton (East Yorkshire) where we lived in the UK.  According to Wikpedia,  Wakefield has a population of 1663 but it  is only a fifteen minute drive from the busy little town of Richmond  (population 11,000) where you can buy almost anything you need. We will be living on the edge of the village but within a short walk of the centre.  We went to have another look around the house yesterday, just to see if our furniture will all fit in, and find out where all the switches and stopcocks are in case of emergency.   It has been a while since we agreed to buy it, so it was  good to go back and remind ourselves of what we are getting into!   The garden is great, it's already divided up into smaller areas, there are lawns, vegetable gardens, a chicken run and hen house, a water garden and a small creek running through the centre.  There is even a dairy with stalls for milking two cows!   We have peach, plum and walnut trees already in fruit  and the fencing is secure enough for us to be able to get a puppy and chickens quite soon .
  The house is quite badly in need of a lick of paint inside and there are loads of jobs that need doing to make it our  own and get it into a good state of repair.  This will be the fourth house that we have renovated, so although we had vowed never to do it again, at least we know what we are getting into!
 In general the standard of housing here is not as high as it is in the UK.  It's quite usual for houses not to have double glazing or insulation and because it is an earthquake zone, the majority are not made of permanent materials (brick or stone) so they can feel quite flimsy.    Having said that, there has been a lot of new development in recent years and all new houses are built to a similar specification as they would be in England.    The older villa type houses like ours are made of native hardwoods such as Rimu and feel very solid, they sit on wooden piles rather than concrete foundations and are usually roofed with corrugated steel  (very  noisy in the rain!).  Our heating will come from a woodburning stove with a solar panel on the roof to help heat our water. 

 Here is a quick photo tour of Wakefield, including one of our house taken from a nearby hillside.