Final Days at the Big Blue House

Once we had received word from Vanari that the Snowy River we ordered should be ready in November 2024, we began the enormous job of preparing our Big Blue House for the rental market.  We figured giving it 8-9 months, the process should be a breeze, but it turns out that after 15 years in one place, the transition of our offspring from children through teens to young adults, the deaths of my parents and my inheritance of assorted family heirlooms, coupled with my passion for op shop gems – we had an awful lot to sort through! 

Our first day in the Big Blue House - 15 November 2009

Or should I say I did… Louis would happily have sent huge swathes of my carefully collated collections to an op shop as sentimentality over material belongings is not in his nature.  However, we split the chores, so he was in charge of clearing the studio and I managed the clearance of all my bumph in the house – and even I had to admit there was a lot that did not really need to stay there! 

By the time we headed up to Ruakaka to collect Banjo I had sent carloads of stuff to the local op shop and packed boxes and boxes of my “essentials” into the loft. Since closing Louis’ studio on 1 November, we had shifted all the music gear (except the upright grand piano!) upstairs into the mixing room and started stacking all our favourite furniture into the tracking room downstairs.

Taking advantage of our time away, we scheduled a flooring company to come in and sand down and revarnish the beautiful kauri floorboards in the kitchen, dining and living room – a job we had deferred for several years as it was so intrusive, requiring us to remove ALL the furniture from these spaces.  Back from Ruakaka and Orewa we could not believe how stunning the floors now looked, and we wished we had done this sooner!

So now we just had the last few rooms to clear – moving first our queen bed, shifting everything out of our bedroom, while we moved into the spare room for 3 nights before moving that bed and finally having to move out for the last night as there were no more beds to sleep in!

Russ & Carlo were awesome moving all the heavy stuff with us, and Nickie gave over two days to help me with the sweeping, mopping and cleaning as we moved out of these last few rooms – we could not have done this without them!  Their reward was to inherit all our leftover food items, cleaning products, garden plants and assorted miscellany! Lucky people!

On Thursday morning we cleared the very last items out of the house, I cleaned the final three rooms and then we said our final farewells to our home of over 15 years. 

The lyrics of Abba’s break up song “Knowing Me Knowing You” ran through my head –

“In these old familiar rooms, children would play

Now there’s only emptiness, nothing to say”

“Walking through an empty house, tears in my eyes

This is where the story ends, this is goodbye”

As excited as I am to start on our epic adventures in Banjo, there is definitely a feeling of closure… I have no idea if we will ever live here again, and even if we do, this is definitely the end of an amazing 15 year chapter in our lives.