Dear WCC

It’s been 20 years since I moved into the family home to care for my elderly parents. I thought it would be great to bring you up to date with the property situation and thanks for being a proactive, visionary Council.

Our family is doing OK, the children have asthma and other respiratory issues but they share an oxygen cylinder with their grandparents. I sponge my parents daily as they cannot climb in and out of the cast iron claw bath which so many years ago seemed practical, functional and beautiful. The gas unit which has supplied the house for so long is hanging in there, but the smell of gas is not prominent as the back door has rotted away and doesn’t quite close, the Wellington wind is a blessing after all. We stuff the DomPost into the window/wall cavities, our Community Health worker tells us this is a fire risk. As you know the DomPost is cheaper than trying to get permission to renovate an old house that is governed by the WCC Heritage Rules. Fortunately, as the tourists from sunny California walk pass they wave and offer encouraging words, telling us how cute our house looks from the street. It seems living in the Heritage zone has one advantage.

Now that I have brought you up-to-date I really wanted to tell you my kids are fine, my parents healthy and active, we thoroughly enjoy living in our Thorndon home since we renovated it and replaced all the windows with ‘look-alikes’ that could cope with double glazing. We installed central heating, relined and increased insulation in the walls, we rewired and popped in a couple of skylights in the hallway. At your recommendation we considered and incorporated solar heating panels on the roof, our power bills are no longer cause for concern.

So, thanks WCC for having the foresight to deal with the world as it is and not applying Heritage zoning to the majority of areas within Thorndon.

Your happy rate-paying customer.