Sarah van der Kley: As deckchair general, I give the orders

Sarah van der Kley

The only thing better than a three day weekend is a four day weekend!

Labour Weekend is a time when Hawke's Bay gets to thumb its nose at the rest of the country's three days off and take four days instead.

What you do with that time is up to you. Some like to get away, others do nothing at home, and some see it as a great time to get things done around their little slice of paradise, which is exactly what I did.

Well, in reality, I supervised other people getting things done.

We're in the process of building a home and as it can be quite an expensive venture we're trying to save money any way we can.

We're very fortunate to have my dad project-managing it for us and are doing lots of the landscaping ourselves.

A friend of my father's donated to us some rusty old metal arches to display in our front yard.

So over the weekend I sat on my deckchair, sipping a cold drink, while the rest of the family slaved away digging holes, banging in posts and trying to get the arches level.

It was hard work organising that lot, let me tell you!

As we have a corner section, the idea of this "art installation" was to give us a bit of privacy. That has majorly backfired.

Turns out they're so unique, that every single person who walks past our house has a good gawk into the yard, trying to work out what the arches are for.

I'm now asking myself the same question, but God forbid we take them down after all the back-breaking labour that went into putting them up.

In between my duties of bossing people around from my chair, I also managed to meet some of our soon-to-be neighbours.

The couple next door are both police officers, which is great for a couple of reasons.

It feels a bit safer to have cops living in the neighbourhood (especially if they bring their police cars home), and when the 12-year-old is tired and refusing to go to school, we can just ask our friendly neighbours to pop over and arrest him.

They assured us they'll have quite a high-tech security system in place which includes cameras and a ferocious guard dog . . . a labradoodle.

Can't wait to see that thing chase any would-be burglars away.

• Don't miss Adam Green and Sarah van der Kley on The Hits Hawke's Bay from 6am to 9am, Monday to Friday