Re-thatching – take 2

In December last year I hired a man and his team to re-thatch the Bean’s cottage.  If you have been following my blog you may recall I have mentioned that this project did not go so well, and after a nasty run-in with the man, I was left with a badly thatched roof that leaked.

 

This is what it looked like

You could even see daylight from inside…..

In fact, the new thatch job leaked even more than the roof did before they started.

So now I have had to have it fixed.  Farmer Alf to the rescue again – he arranged for two men to come in, remove much of the grass, rebundle it and re-thatch and put a new cement cap on.  Quite a costly exercise but still a lot less than hiring another company to do it.  Now it looks like this

Much better!

They even had a few bundles over and fixed up a few holes in my cottage roof where baboons had pulled out the grass.  Also much better!

So if you live in or near Hoedspruit and wish to have your roofs thatched, best you speak to me about who to use.  I know all about it now!

Final touches

A few more small issues to finish up and then the guest cottage will be complete.  Light switch covers and the toilet pipe are still to be done.  Gone are the technicolour curtains and holes in the walls.  New bedding and linen makes such a difference!

Guest cottage renovations.

The renovations continue. Wall hole repairs and paint work now completed. I also replaced some of the window putty and painted the window frames.  It still looks very rustic and basic but much cleaner at least.

I would really like to replace the shower door but that will have to wait for now. For now, I just have to polish up the floor, finish descaling the wall tiles and find something to cover/improve that ugly pipe behind the toilet. Any suggestions?  I don’t think paint will stick to it – It is half cement and half plastic with wax sealant on.

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Blue veins – a quirky touch.

This weekend I decided to experiment with the cracks in our paving around the pool.  The paving was laid many years ago while the surrounding trees were small.  Now that the trees have grown some of the paving has moved and cracked.

I quite like the rustic look it gives and I don’t want to lay any new paving because it will take away from the feel of the place.  I will be filling most of the cracks with cement to stop any weeds growing through.  Recently I saw a picture of some stone steps that had been built with some mosaic tiles between the stones and I wanted to try this in a crack to see the effect.  I am quite ready to chop it all out again if I don’t like it.

First I had to buy cement – I never knew there were so many kinds so it was a little stressful deciding what product to use.  Because some of the cracks were quite deep and wide I settled on a builders mix of cement and sand.  When I got home I saw that it was packaged separately and because I didn’t want to mix up the whole bag at once, I had to estimate the mix – lets hope it doesn’t all crumble as soon as it rains.

After filling the crack with the cement mix, the Bean and I started laying mosaics, beads, stones and other interesting small items into the cement.

And this is what it looked like half way through

I took a few more photos after the cement had dried – now all I have to do is decide if it stays or gets chopped out again.  Fred was very interested while we were laying the tiles and was rather jealous that the paving got so much “tickling” instead of him.

You can click on the thumbnails to have a closer look

What do you think?

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Design dilemma

The floor in my main cottage and on my veranda is driving me totally crazy.  It is covered in pure white tiles. They would look pretty in a pristine home in the city but here they are just so impractical. I have to sweep and wash the floor twice a day to keep it looking slightly reasonable but most times it just looks like we never clean. Living in close proximity to water and sand does NOT work with white tiles.  Also, living under a thatch (grass) roof creates quite a bit of dust which shows up very easily on these tiles.  To add to the mess the tiles are very old and some of them are chipped and cracked.

I have always planned to renovate this cottage. My dreams of what I would really like to do are outside of my current budget so I need to find a way to improve the building in such a way that I can continue to make changes as I can afford them.

So you may ask why I am puzzling and that I should just do the floor and then do the rest when I can.  It’s not so simple.  I have a dividing wall in the cottage which closes off the pokey pantry/wash-up area from the lounge dining room area which I would also like to change.  How exactly I want to change it is still not clear.  See below – the red line is the wall I don’t like.

If I pull down the wall I will also have to remove the cupboards that are against it – that means new cupboards which I can’t afford right now.  The cupboards are built-in, so if I change the floor and want to change cupboards at a later stage, I would then have to re-do some of the flooring which is not very practical. The same goes for the wall.

One option with the wall is that I just break it down to the cupboard level and make the cupboards into an island – I could leave a portion of the wall up just to screen the washing-up area.  This was what I was going to do until a friend who visited (who is a developer and has designed and built many designer homes, hotels and lodges) suggested I move the wall further out and split my lounge off – make the kitchen bigger to incorporate a dining area and open the whole front of the cottage onto the veranda with folding doors.  This sounds so wonderful but I am sure it is going to be so over my current budget.  If I go this route, which is probably the best way to go, I will be living in dust and cement for months while I do parts slowly as there is no way I would manage to install new cupboards at this stage.

Right now I really don’t care what I do but I have to get rid of the floor before I go stir crazy! I want to replace the tiles with a screed floor similar to one of these – preferably not a light colour.

I like the top two on the right and the bottom one on the right.  One can even insert some type of pattern, pebbles or even wood to make an edge or design similar to  the picture below although I would not go for this type of pattern but rather a type of edging or border around the room.

Anyone got any wonderful suggestions before I rip the cottage to shreds?

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Homemade gifts

This year I decided to give homemade gifts to my family for Christmas.  My reasoning was not purely from a financial perspective but also from a green/recycling angle as well as how much fun and love goes into making things for loved ones.  I have been dying to show you what we made but had to wait till everyone had their gifts.

The Bean and I made some homemade tomato and basil jam which we wrapped up – a bottle for everyone.

We  gave each of the girls a homemade recycled handbag made from old curtains.  These were made for us by my colleague Charlie – a trade and barter deal.

and for my dad I painted this painting

I think this has been the most rewarding Christmas ever – I so enjoyed preparing the gifts.

Did you make any of your gifts?  I would love to hear about them.

Edit:   There is a great recipe for a homemade scented hand scrub in the comments of this post. Thanks Greg.

He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

~  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Full house?

I think they are almost ready to fly. Well I hope so.  The is no room left for growth.  Learn more about these chicks on the following posts.

• Paradise Fly catchers
• Babies hatch

Mobile home?

The  giant african land snail (Achatina sp.) I found sneaking around my parsley.

Replacing roof support.

A hair-raising experience which I really couldn’t watch.  I was afraid the entire roof would collapse during the process.

1.  Rotten roof support devoured by termites.

Really devoured!

2.  Support roof and remove old tree trunk.

3. You call that support???

4. Lots of hard work

5. New roof support. Whew!

I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.

~ Primo Levi