Sunday 20th November 2011
Thirty-Five degrees Celsius in the cabin! Not a day for physical work, but I’ve had to do laundry, which counts as hard labour in this morning sun.
Most of the week was spent levelling and compacting an area at right angles to the front of the cabin to receive the new plank cabin which will serve as a workshop / store room. The cabin has become just too crowded to be comfortable and it is just about impossible to do any constructive tinkering with my tools in a pile behind the door. As it happens, Hobby Wendy is having a “special” until the end of November, which made the decision to spend the money a little easier. The pile of recycled building material stacked behind the cabin needs to be protected from weather and theft anyway.
A recycled curtain across the door cuts down the midday glare when I'm working at the computer
Sitting at the desk near the door to write in the middle of the day, I’ve have a choice… put up with the glare off the light sandy soil outside, or close the door and melt into a sweat-puddle. I cured the problem this week by installing a curtain on a rail across the door. I’ll look for someone in the village who is willing to earn a few Rand by cutting and finishing the other curtain to fit the windows. At the moment they’re covered by some antique green linen I’ve just tacked into the wood. Very Hillbilly!
I also began the astonishingly convoluted and paper-heavy process of getting Building / Restoration plans through the TWK Municipality…
Boggy Mansion
When Jeffrey appeared to greet me, I was not ready to set him to work. He now also works for various other people in the area, so we agreed that when he came on Thursday he would start clearing the potential building area around the house. This would give me an idea of how much site-levelling I was in for, and also give me access to the foundations.
While waiting for Guy Whittle to visit the site on Friday, I dug down behind the house, against the back wall. I discovered that the house does in fact have mortar and stone foundations. A little shallow, and only the width of the wall, but a little better than the packed mud and stone on ground level which is quite common in the area. I also discovered that the sandy soil was quite damp, but that may be because of the recent unseasonal rain and the fact that the drip-line from the un-guttered roof is right against the wall,
The Architect, Guy, was quite enthusiastic about the project when he arrived. We discussed various technical issues – mainly about joining the new and old structures and supporting the old structure. Although he is a Consultant to Cape Heritage, he is also quite pragmatic about the practicalities of updating old buildings. From an aesthetic point of view, he had only one suggestion, namely that I replaced the rather overwhelming large windows in the “stoep kamer” with two smaller ones which match the proportions of the other windows in the facade. My idea was to maximise the view of the as yet un-identified tree that had “sold” the house to Christa. However, the large window has jarred ever since I first printed out the plans in Johannesburg.
He had printed out my original plans, unaltered, and suggested that I take them and “throw my hat in the door” at TWK in Caledon. (Theewaterskloof municipal region) At the Municipality I was helped by a very pleasant young man – who took my rough printouts and asked me to e-mail him the Surveyor General’s site drawing and a copy of the title deed. The Chief building Inspector would then decide whether we really needed to go the whole Cape Heritage route for a derelict “herdershuisie”.
Oiiiyyhh-Veyyyhhh!! – the nice young man then handed me a twenty-eight page stack of forms to fill in – or have filled in by a slew of Certified Engineers! I suspect that it is a “one size fits all” kind of form, and I’m hoping that most of it is only relevant to somebody building hospitals, bridges and hydroelectric schemes!
A day or two later I received a reply to my email – with the contact details of somebody at Cape Heritage… apparently I need to find out from them whether Boggy Hovel is a “heritage building” or not. I’ve passed the information on to Guy, since he knows his way around that territory. Here’s hoping that the Manor Hovel at Boggy Pond doesn’t fall into the same bureaucratic category as the Manor Houses of Vergelegen, Meerlust, Spier and Groot Constantia….
I Build a Tennis-court…
Well, more like a table-tennis court! At first I considered building a store room around the base of the solar tower, perhaps using a kind of “wattle & daub” construction. Then I considered rammed earth in a shutter system, and even off-cut timber from the sawmills at Bot Rivier…
These are all noble and “green” possibilities, but have serious drawbacks. Off-cut timber from the saw mill is, by definition, not long enough, and it would take several journeys and a lot of time to scrounge enough suitable pieces to build even a 2 metre by 2 metre jigsaw-puzzle workshop… The soil on the property doesn’t really make mud – it is very sandy, and would need the addition of a fair amount of cement to hold it together once the shutter was removed. There are sources of clay in the area that have been used to build several houses nearby at Bethoskloof, but finding it and stepping through the politics to acquire it would take more time than I have. I need to create a workshop and store separate from my accommodation as a matter of urgency.
The fact is that unless one has one’s own supply of the right clay soil, it is just about impossible to build for less than the cost of a Wendy House. Plank cabins also go up about as fast as you can transfer the price out of your bank account.
I smoked several pipes and drank much Koffiehuis Gold while either ambling around the cabin or sitting on a camp stool outside, just thinking about where to place the workshop. The idea is to position it in a way that it can be joined to this one later and serve as the first, if rather primitive, guest accommodation.
The nearly completed pad for the new cabin
By placing the workshop in front of and to the East of Boggy Cabin I would create an area between them which could become a sheltered outdoor living area. Somewhat later it would be relatively easy to build a timber passage to connect the two.
Hobby Wendy’s special offer seems to have been good for business, because they can only deliver at the end of the month. Actually that suits me very well – I can take the time to do the levelling myself. I need the physical exercise, and I can save the labour costs
Because of the slope, the Northern side has to be built up about 25 cm to match the level of the main cabin. This means recovering the sand excavated for this cabin bucket by bucket, levelling it, then compacting it. At first I used the bakkie to compact the base layer, but then hit upon the idea of using one of the blue plastic drums as a roller. Fortunately I decided to experiment after only half-filling it with water – getting just over 100Kg moving – or stopping it – is quite enough exercise for a Keyboard jock! The other advantage is that one can compact each application of sand in thin layers, which is preferable in any case.
I should have the Tennis Court completed by Monday evening… then its on to the next project… making compost bins and starting to make next year’s compost!