A Week In the Office…

Sunday 27^th November 2011

I had delegated the task of tackling Cape Heritage to Guy, since he knows the territory – in more senses than one. Oh dear! Whether it is because they consider Boggy Hovel to be as important as Vergelegen, Groot Constantia etc. or whether they need the information to come to a decision, they have requested, virtually, “twenty-seven eight-by-ten coloured photographs, with Circles and Arrows and Diagrams on the back of each one, saying what each one was and where it was found,” to quote Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant”!

TWK Municipality won’t accept any plans without clearance from Cape Heritage, so I set about putting together a Portfolio about Boggy Hovel…

I continued working on the Ping-Pong court in the early morning and late afternoon, (between rain-squalls) eventually finishing it on Friday evening. By the time the pad was level, I calculated that I had moved 2.5 cubic metres of sand. The one-ton bakkie only has a capacity of 1.48 cubic metres, so that was just short of two loads, all carried various distances in a twenty-litre paint drum. Ah well, when the Workshop arrives, I’ll have room to store a wheelbarrow!

Pink Rambling Roses growing just below the house

After taking a comprehensive set of photographs of the interior of the house – and some flower pictures for Christa – I set about labelling them and compiling a PDF file to e-mail to Guy. (I didn’t go as far as “Circles and Arrows…”)

I had just finished the photo-file when I had a visitor.. “Oom Jordan”, who now lives at the other end of the village, came limping through the rain on his trademark metal crutch. Over a cup of tea he told me that he had virtually grown up in the “stoepkamer”. He was a ward of his Aunt & Uncle, who had built the house in 1929 or 1930. His Uncle volunteered for service in the War and was sent “Up North”, where he saw action at Tobruk and in Italy. He returned safely and had certainly added the stoep room by the time Jordan was born in 1946. (Some of the pictures can be seen on the Restoration Page)

I was about to offer Jordan a lift home when Stephen popped around in Sandy’s compact Citroen. He was giving it a test run, after having the clutch repaired. He had e-mailed the Agents for information on the nearest Dealer, but was still waiting for a reply. In the meantime the car was repaired on the spot by a chap called David who lives across the valley. David lives in a large metal shed, where he builds replica “D – Type” Jaguar cars for export to Germany. We have all types here…

I added the historical information I had just learned to the Heritage presentation, e-mailed it, then took advantage of the cool weather to continue lugging buckets of sand to the Ping-Pong court.

Early the next morning Guy called. The good news was that he was terribly impressed with my “Portfolio Of Boggy Hovel” and thought that Heritage would be too, since it would be the best submission he had ever made to them. The bad news was that he reminded me that I had to appoint a certified Engineer to sign off the design of the Foundations and Structural Elements! He gave me the contact details of a firm of Consulting Engineers in Hermanus, but it was Friday morning by the time we had sorted out an incorrect cell number and I obtained an e-mail address. I now await the Engineer’s “Schedule of Costs” – which already sounds expensive!

I will also need to “Appoint” a Plumber and an Electrician… I rather suspect that before I can lay one brick upon another I shall also have to recruit a Tinker, Tailor and Candlestick-Maker…

I had been putting off a shopping trip to Town (Caledon) because there was the possibility that I might need to go to Cape Town over the week-end to handle an audition by an Australian actress. There was even a vague chance that Christa would be flown down too, but after much indecision and cross-talk, we still had no confirmation by Friday midday. Since supplies were running low, I headed off to Caledon with a shopping list from Sandy too.

Yellow Flowers, which are probably weeds, with the Blue Gum woods behind

By Saturday morning I was fairly crocked from the earthmoving operation and felt like a week end. I had been pondering solutions to the irrigation water problem, and had decided that I had better come up with a plan, or vegetable farming would probably be too expensive. One part of the solution would obviously be to harvest rainwater run-off during winter and store it for the growing season. To do this efficiently it would help to have a contour map of the area… so I set about finding an affordable – or free – map-making programme on the internet. Eventually I did find one and installed it, but the learning curve will be steep. I last did map-making as a Boy Scout – well before cartography disappeared behind a cloud of digital jargon. Switching between the programme and the user’s manual it felt at times as though my eyeballs were playing conkers! Ah well, I wanted to challenge myself by learning new skills…

Sunday morning was set aside for the laundry I hadn’t been able to do because of the intermittent rain, but I awoke after seven… to the sound of… rain! It didn’t last, but the overcast did, and created a very “in bed with a cup of soup” atmosphere. I grasped at the excuse not to do the laundry and ventured out to start on the compost bins.

I needed to flatten some recycled corrugated sheet for the sides of the bins, so I did the obvious thing – rode over them with the bakkie! It worked up to a point, but the final flattening had to be done with a hammer, which of course created a lot of noise. Although the nearest neighbour is 72 metres away, I could hear the hammer blows echoing off the Blue Gum wood. I also realised that “Die Spruit” was eerily quiet, even for a Sunday, probably because of the helluva thrash I’d heard on Saturday night. Once I had completed one side, I decided to label the effort as a successful feasibility study and stop before I provoked hangover rage from the RDP houses across the empty field!

By the time I’d done more unproductive fiddling with computers and map-making software it was time to set off for Steve ‘n Sandy’s for an early braai to round off the week.