Day 1 Cleaning up our storage & dinner Out

Tuesday 23 June

I spoke too soon about the sunshine - we woke to grey skies & drizzle. Not a big issue as once we’d walked Albi round the block our big task for the day was heading over to Blockhouse Bay to sort out a bunch of our stuff in storage. We'd arranged to pop in for a couple of days with the property agent and wondered if we would meet our new tenants while we were there. Three of them were at work, but Zayd works from home as a digital graphic and arts designer with a studio in Ella's old room, so we got to meet him and he was happy to show us around the old place and see how they had it all set up. It looked fab, and we were also introduced to Percy, the feline in charge of the house who lives in our old room, sleeping by a heater for 90% of the day, just waiting for his mum to feed him 🧡. We loved seeing how others style our old place - much classier than when we lived there… and fewer “things” - note to self, aim for minimalism when we finally settle in a new place!

When we set off in Banjo in December 2024 we stacked all our belongings in either the loft or the garage which was Louis’ studio. Sadly the ground floor area of the studio struggles with Auckland humidity and a bunch of our antique wooden furniture and some leather goods have been attacked by mould. So the plan was to offload a few of the excess items to create more air flow, and to clean away the mould and polish up the wood with Pledge whilst adding a bunch of moisture grabbers to the mix! Chaos as I sorted through stuff in the studio - the old wooden furniture needed heaps of TLC and I managed to identify 3 large banana boxes of stuff and two big bags of clothing for the op shop. The worst culprit for mould was Louis' Ted Baker leather belt which was almost unrecognisable 😲.

We paused for lunch upstairs - our favourite fried chicken from Best Sushi in the Bay - it is so good, all others pale in comparison. We also swapped a few items in that we didn’t need in Banjo and grabbed a couple of things we wanted… and it took us most of the day!

Came back to walk Albi again - see gorgeous magnolia plant above as a representation of that walk - and freshen up then went out to dinner with our lovely old neighbours, Mike & Ayesha. Mike & Ayesha started out as our property managers, but our previous tenants proved to be a little tricky to handle so I think they were happy to pass the job back to Ray Whites! Mike has now started up his own very successful company and with a baby on the way, Ayesha is going to be pretty busy too.

Great dinner at Musashi in New Lynn and lovely catching up - Ayesha is 38 weeks pregnant so we were excited to see her before she popped! Gino gave up a lovely deep woofy welcome - pretty sure he remembers us even after all this time 🖤