Pretty much from day one we’ve wanted to clad our house in cedar. We love it and think it’s perfect for the home we’re building and the setting it’s in. Yummo!

We hunted around a lot to find the style of cedar that we wanted and came across Rosenfeld Kidson. Mark Liggins and the team there are awesome and have been so good to work with, putting up with our continual requests for more info, samples and colours. Until we settled upon our dream combination. A mixture of horizontal and vertical shiplap boards. Using a profile that has a centre groove to provide the appearance of a narrower profile, which we wanted, but with the benefit of being faster to install and requiring less material.

In case you want to know the specifics, we’re going with:

Horizontal boards – RKA766 ex200x22mm (161×18.5mm finish)
Vertical boards – RK59 ex200x22mm (165×18.5mm finish)

In the new driftwood colour by Dryden WoodOil, with a dressed face (super smooth vs band-sawn finish) and vertical grain.

The stream is like our little baby. We love it and have been spending hours and hours and hours in it, on it and around it as we try to make it look as natural as possible as soon as possible.

To cut a long planning and approvals process short, we worked with Lance Millward from Verdant Green to design a riparian planting and remediation plan as part of our Resource Consent. He was awesome and the Council loved our final plan.

So over the past weeks. Well many, many weeks. We’ve been implementing that plan.

That started with lining the whole channel with a white geo-textile fabric to prevent erosion. Which was easier said than done when it came to pushing plastic ground pins through the neigh on inpenitrable fabric! But thanks to Kylie and her Mum, their perseverance paid off and it was finally laid down.

Then we laid rocks over the top of that to form a hardy channel and armour the banks. We wanted natural looking rocks vs quarry blasted rip rap so we were stoked to discover Mangatangi River Rocks down near Thames and their beautiful autumnal river rocks.

I got 10 tonnes delivered by truck, then Kylie’s parents, her brother and his girlfriend helped us move every single rock by hand. Thanks guys!

Then in between a lot of help from Lance as he pinned logs to the banks to form stable planting areas, placed large feature rocks and dug gabion baskets into the channel, we’ve been pottering away making everything as perfect as it can be. Which has included many more trips out to the quarry to get more rocks by the trailer load. And by my rough calculations we brought back another 10 tonnes at least.

A couple of months later and we’re stoked with how it’s all coming together. It looks so natural already and the plants haven’t even grown. The stream is justifiably grand to be the central feature of our house and we couldn’t be happier.

In fact, like proud parents, we’ll pop in almost every day to see our wee baby. And I’m pretty sure when we’ve moved in, you’ll be able to see me sitting on the glass bridge for hours just watching the water trickle by.

Here’s a wee time lapse I started, then the batteries ran out!

Down at the Mangatangi River Rocks quarry getting our beautiful rocks to line the stream

So great to see even more progress on the section as our contractors got stuck into modifying our stream which we were given permission to do as part of our Resource Consent.

There were a couple of reasons we wanted to modify it. Firstly to make it large enough to hold all water levels, even in a 100 year flood event. Secondly to make it look way better. And finally we shifted the lower part a few metres so we could fit all of our living pod on one side of it.

The guys also cut the building platform on the bedroom side. So exciting to see exactly where it will go.

We spent forever clearing out all of the built up debris, dead branches and noxious weeds along one of the banks surrounding the section. One day it poured down on us for hours which was pretty miserable. But it was awesome to see the stream flow, the first time we’d been on the section during a decent rainfall. Can’t wait to make it all pretty