The Te Kawa family are loving their new home. From left, Melissa, on her knee Ataahua (4), Neriah (4), Stacey and on his knee Elliana (22 months).

Playing hide and seek with torches in an abandoned restaurant is the sort of memory Stacey and Melissa Te Kawa want to give their children.

With a trampoline in the lounge and a new baby due any day, the couple and their four (soon to be five) children are on the adventure of their lives.

They left behind a small house in South Auckland three weeks ago for a new home in the former Stratford RSA building, which is 850 square metres and in need of some TLC.



"We kind of fell in love with this great adventure and a little bit of crazy for our kids, just making those memories, something out of the box," Melissa said.

SIMON O'CONNOR/STUFF A trampoline is dwarfed by the Te Kawa family's new lounge. Stacey and Melissa Te Kawa are turning the Stratford RSA building into a family home.

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"You daydream about those things when you're younger and as you settle down and have kids and get a mortgage you get a little bit more confined to those expectations of what you should be doing."

Their new home came equipped with a bunch of billiard tables and its own restaurant, with dusty bottles partly full of liquor in the bar.

SIMON O'CONNOR/STUFF Neriah (4), Elliana (22 months) and Ataahua (4) Te Kawa on their indoor trampoline.

There's no shower, but work is underway to turn the former men's toilet into a family bathroom.

At the moment there's enough toilets in the building for everyone to have their own, Melissa laughs.

The RSA closed permanently in 2015 after years of struggle to stay afloat.

The couple had been looking to make a move to Taranaki for about a year, and the huge concrete building just a few dozen metres from the town's centre, parks, playgrounds and pool, was perfect.

Melissa's parents moved to Stratford in February. Stacey now has a job at Mitre 10.

﻿Having renovated their previous home together in Auckland - Melissa was laying tiles just days before her four year old twins were born - they knew they could do a lot of the work themselves, she said.

"When we first bought our house in Auckland we didn't know the difference between screws and nails, but we managed to fully renovate our little shoebox."

They plan to build a family kitchen in the open plan lounge area, and convert the former billiards room to bedrooms once the roof is repaired.

"It'll be an 'as-we-go' project. We're just going to work and save and try to do as much as we can ourselves.

"It's a long term project for us, we don't expect that it's going to be what we envision very fast. We have young children, and we're going to have four under five next week."

The children have a large play area set up with a row of rocking horses, tables and art supplies.

There are several other "lounge" areas set up with couches and comfy chairs, and the family-sized trampoline fits in easily as well.

"It's pretty crazy. They don't care about what colour the carpet is or if it's had beer spilt on it or there's rips in the walls, they're just going to remember coming out of their bedroom and having their own massive play space and the trampoline, and riding their bikes around the lounge," she said.

"Our dream, our maybe naive dream, is we want to turn the RSA part into our permanent forever dream home. It might be a 20-year plan.

"Obviously we don't need a restaurant, that's not what we're about, we're about raising our kids and doing up our house, so we'll just lease it out. We'll settle in and see what the community needs."

She said the family wanted to create a memorial to the RSA's history at the front of the building.

"We really want to do something that honours the returned servicemen and what the building was. I know it's a huge loss and remembering the people we love is a really important thing to do so we want to hang onto that for the space we're in.

"This building has a lot of community heritage and a lot of love and importance attached to it and we really want to honour that, see how we can maintain the mana of what this place means to everybody."

She said the family were enjoying getting to know the new community and they couldn't stop smiling.

"We went out to dinner last night and we bumped into three people that we knew already, and we haven't been here three weeks.

"It's a beautiful town. We can't wait to get stuck in and be involved in stuff, participate and see where we can be a part of it all."