Waimea Weekly Locally Owned and Operated
Wednesday 7 September 2022
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Warmest and wettest August on record JO KENT
Restoration of Post Office begins JO KENT It’s been almost a year since one of Wakefield’s oldest buildings was put on the market and the new owners are now ready to start renovating the 112-year-old valued structure. Helen and James Cooper live in Spring Grove and fell in love with the place as soon as they saw it. “I love restoring old properties and we’d just renovated another derelict property in Wakefield when we saw this pop up,” Helen says. “I knew we had to have it and transform it back to its glory days
as it really is beautiful.” The historic building was last sold 23 years ago to two sisters for $130,000. Their initial plans of using it as office space never took off and the building has stood empty for years. “Of course, everything needs doing, from the structure to the ceilings and everything in between, so it’s a huge project. But we plan to make it the centre of the community once more.” Built in 1909, it’s a category 2 heritage building, which means the inside can be updated but the outside façade can’t be changed.
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“We have an architect on board who will be able to do amazing things here, so we’re really excited about what we can make it.” Funding from Heritage NZ was granted last week and will be distributed towards carpentry, strengthening, restoration, turret repairs, roofing works, making good cladding and associated framing and re-painting the building.
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The country has just had its warmest and wettest winter on record with temperatures in Tasman, Nelson and Marlborough more than 1.2 degrees above average, according to NIWA. With three consecutive record warm winters under our belts, the nationwide average temperature was 9.8 degrees - 1.4 degrees above the 1981-2010 average. Temperatures surpassed the previous winter record set just last year. Of the 10 warmest winters on record, six have occurred since 2013. It was also the wettest winter on record and featured one of the most damaging events last month, when a state of emergency was declared across the region. It was only Nelson’s third wettest winter on record, despite the flooding, but NIWA said the two previous wettest winters for Nelson were prior to 1900. Most of the country had above normal or well above normal rainfall and 42 locations had a record or near-record wet winter. NIWA forecaster Ben Noll says it was a wild winter resulting in two very impressive records. “It’s a really big season as just one of those records would be impressive enough, but we got both with the warmest and wettest.”
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