Chandeliers and Crown Lynn in a polished Whanganui gem.
With a house tour looming, a Whanganui couple toiled all hours to have their renovation completed in time
Ahistoric Whanganui villa has twice floored its owners with good and bad revelations. When Gerry Hardie and Judie Smith tore up the dining room carpet they found a patch of chipboard among the mataī floorboards. As they’d hoped, the couple found a boarded-up staircase they happily reinstated to gain internal access to the basement garage.
The second flooring discovery was no cause for celebration. When they peeled back the linoleum in their en suite bathroom, they were faced with rotting timber.
“We could see the ground, air and light, it had an indooroutdoor flow of its own,” Judie says. “We were just going to put new flooring down and we had to replace the whole bathroom. The $1000 job turned into a $12,000 job.”
The former Tauranga residents had no qualms about tackling a renovation project when they moved to Whanganui in May 2016. They had cashed in on the buoyant Bay of Plenty housing market, sold their two-year-old home and seized the opportunity to live somewhere quieter, with less traffic and more cultural charm. Plans to downsize were foiled when they fell for a charming former farmhouse. “It was a big, rambling, 280sqm, five-bedroom, highceilinged place and it was in good condition,” Gerry says. “So many old villas have been bastardised by renovations in the 80s or 90s that are totally out of keeping with the character of the home. This one hadn’t been.”
Successive owners had retained the wide skirting boards and solid rimu ceiling, lattice windows, the wide hallway and the 3.5m stud. The home’s original 12 hectare landholding had long since been reduced to a 1250sqm section, five minutes’ drive from the city centre, but it was more land than the newcomers needed.
Judie quickly found work as a clinical nurse manager in Whanganui Hospital while former kiwifruit manager Gerry abandoned his golfing retirement plans to strap on a tool belt.
While Gerry had already managed two house construction projects and was a practised home handyman, this was Judie’s first major renovation. >
“I always wanted to do up an older house,” Judie says. “I’m totally addicted to those renovation shows on TV, the hardships they go through and what they’ve created. I’d come home from work and I’d be handed a paintbrush or a sander or sandpaper. I had to make that sander my new best friend.”
One by one, they ticked off jobs in each room in the house; floors, ceilings, walls, a new kitchen. Gerry commando-crawled beneath the building to install underfloor insulation and tackled everything from decking to garden paths.
The pressure was on, thanks to NZ House & Garden; they had promised the house would be finished in time for this year’s Whanganui house tour to fundraise for breast cancer.
Judie’s younger sister Catherine, who had also shifted from Tauranga with her family, pitched in to help prepare the house for its February tour deadline.
“We just seemed to move from one pile of dust to another,” Gerry says. “The dust would settle and the next thing, we’d be pulling another room apart. I think we did five years’ work in five months.”
The interiors are Judie’s forte and she has firm ideas about avoiding old-fashioned colours and anything too bright. She hunted down chandeliers for most rooms and found a light fixture with industrial leanings for the kitchen, to complement the French antique zinc-topped island bench. >
Judie swatted away the notion of a scullery, insisting she did not want to be “stuck in a cupboard” while preparing meals. However, she does sometimes retreat to her pantry to read a magazine away from visiting grandchildren and resident pets.
The industrious pair also tackled the garden, sometimes setting to work with axes as well as shovels. Three Kermadec Island pōhutukawa were excised to shed light and warmth on the darkest, dampest southern side of the house. The couple spent weeks chipping away at a tangled mass of agapanthus, ivy, rocks and hundreds of shrubs and planted neat rows of hedging in this same corner of the property.
“When I drive up each night, I feel very proud of that criss-cross garden. I know the back-breaking work behind it,” says Judie.
And the work continues. Gerry is currently screening off the rain tank that sits beneath the elevated deck above the backyard, while his golf clubs remain parked in the garage.
“I’m not very good at being retired,” he says. “If I don’t have projects, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”