It was all thanks to a former dairy farmer who's
taken on an ambitious project to move the church to the grounds of his
new home.
It's not too often you see a church travelling down
the roads in rural Canterbury.
But it was en route from its old
home as the Catholic church in Colgate to Racecourse Hill Homestead,
near Darfield.
The homestead was facing demolition after being near
wrecked in the Canterbury earthquake, but Brian Cribb and his wife,
cashed up from selling their dairy farms, decided to buy it.
"We thought, 'we've had enough of seeing all these
places fall over in the earthquakes', so we thought we'd come and have a
look at it and decided that we could save it," says Mr Cribb.
It is no small task.
The 1000-square-metre home has
nine bedrooms, nearly as many bathrooms, five living areas, two
commercial kitchens and a billiard room.
"I'd hate to be vacuuming every day," says Mr Cribb.
He won't say what the project's costing him, but just putting a commercial sprinkler system in cost $200,000.
And
then there's the church.
It was the Catholic church in the nearby town
of Colgate, but it was no longer in use.
So the couple decided it was
the perfect addition to have on the grounds of their homestead, and they
bought it.
The logistics of moving it were not
simple or cheap.
Orion had to cut power to the nearby area and bring
down power lines to get the tall building down country roads and through
a ford.
"I thought, 'We're going to have this
fantastic place, which could be good for weddings and parties; why don't
we find a church?'" says Mr Cribb. "And there was one around the
corner, 14km away."
The Cribbs are proud to be restoring a beautiful church and homestead in an area where many similar buildings have been lost.