Boggy Workshop Arrives

29^th November 2011

            I’d had no communication from Hobby Wendy’s (Their redundant apostrophe!) since I received their banking details, so I just had to hope that they would keep to their delivery date.

About 07h45 I received a phone call from “Drikus”, the scion of the family-owned business, wanting to know which of the two roads to use to get here. I directed him to the “Solitaire/Tesselaarsdal” turnoff from Shaw’s Pass, since the other very slightly shorter road is execrable at the moment. He said he would be leaving The Strand at 08h00 and would be here about 09h00, which I thought was illegally optimistic, considering he needed to traverse two mountain passes towing just over half-a-ton!

Tuesday is also garbage collection day here, and I’d missed last week, so before I ambled down to the gate to put out my measly two-weeks worth of refuse in one SPAR packet, I improvised a stand-number sign. Although I’d e-mailed a detailed map, people get confused when confronted by Juffrou Smal’s gate, my old gate, and my new gate next to each other in the dead-end. While I was erecting the sign with an arrow pointing up the hill to my cabin, the local refuse contractors arrived, so I saved them the trouble of hopping off the trailer by tossing my guilty contribution to an unknown land-fill onto the trailer as they passed out of the Smal family compound.

Of course, at 10h47 I received a call from Drikus asking where the hell I was hiding! By the time I had walked down to the road while talking on the phone, I could hear somebody from the Smal clan giving Drikus directions, and very soon his Land-Cruiser and trailer came barrelling up the hill, with my workshop floor – in one piece – bent like a banana over the top of the load.

My effort at getting the “Ping-Pong court” level paid off, because they used almost no plank “shims to get the network of bricks level enough to support the floor. As soon as they unloaded the front gable however I saw a problem…

I had emailed them a diagram to detail the position of the door, so that I could accommodate long objects on the work-bench by working through the door, but they had brought a bog-standard door-in-the-middle module.

Ah well… as Stephen says repeatedly: “It’s a Zozo Hut, it’s not a Grand piano!”

While the team of three chippies erected the hut, I picked Drikus’ brains about painting the cabins, since my original cabin is overdue for a treatment. The “recommended” wood treatment is around R1,000 for five litres, and I guess my cabin would soak up half the price I paid for it in wood preservative!

Drikus was emphatic that the cabin should not be painted, least of all with an acrylic or other water-based paint. It forms only a thin skin on the surface and the wood either dries out,  or water intrudes through the inevitable cracks, becomes trapped in the wood and rots it away under the pretty paint-job.

The correct thing to do is to use raw linseed oil, which soaks into the wood and waterproofs it. If one wants a colour, the thing to do is to use an oil-based paint and “cut” it heavily with raw linseed oil.

One could even use old motor oil or Diesel, but that would only be suitable for a store room which one would not be living in. Since the idea is that these cabins will eventually form the nucleus of  overnight accommodation, so that option is a non-starter. Rustic country living might be marketable, but a cabin ponging as though one was sleeping “right under a blerrie trekker” would be a hard sell!

An hour and fifteen minutes after arriving, Drikus and Team hit the road again, and Jeffrey appeared for lunch, a little peeved that he had missed the grand event, it had happened so quickly. We celebrated by having our lunch in the new “Lounge!”

Steve and Sandy popped around to see “Boggy Cabin Annexe” and we decided that while linseed oil is hardly cheap, it is much more affordable than a fancy wood treatment. Since Steve has two cabins to treat and may soon have another, we would try to source a bulk supply between us.

(I’ve since trawled the Web looking for “Bulk linseed oil, South Africa”… Hmm, either we  buy a tanker-load from China or India, or we buy “edible linseed oil” in small, expensive bottles from a fundamentalist religious freak in Pretoria…)

After everyone had left, I started erecting a “Dexian” framework for shelving. Some years ago, when a video edit room required racks of large tape-decks and other electronics, I had bought a supply of this “big boys Meccano Set”. Video editing rapidly became so computer-based that I no longer needed it, so I rather cleverly tossed it in the bakkie…

Of course I haven’t had a chance to install a light yet, so that was a good excuse to knock off early, open a “Brownie” and a packet of crisps, then write this latest news from Boggy Pond…

A “Brownie”, by the way, is the local jargon for a quart of beer. Now, a quart of beer represents about half my annual consumption, so here’s hoping that I don’t accidentally post this Blog to the front page of the New York Times!