Main House Kitchen, December 2011

So, beginning of December the man and I moved into the main house with NO kitchen. But only for a while....my Muguyer is a clever bugger, I tell you. This is the kitchen as it stood for almost a year since we bought the place...

Luvverly!!!!! And then the man got stuck in and started to make it look like a proper kitchen.......

And now all we need to do is fit the granite slabs, stoves and oven (and of course get the electricity working), but hey, I'm happy!

HAPPY 2012 EVERYONE - MAY WE ALL BE BLESSED IN ABUNDANCE!

Update on main house - December 2011

And so we are drop kicking 2011 goodbye and welcoming in the new year very soon. Here are some before and after pics of the main broke down farm house. Come a long way. It's looking damn good, even if I say so myself.

Before - the front and the side of the house......

Today....the front and side.....taking shape, slowly but surely!!!!!

Before - the back of the house...............December 2010

Today - back of the house......awwwww......

We'll get there, surely we will.

Nov & Dec 2011 - updates on some interesting times

Ah, so much has happened in the last 2 months. The man moved mom single-handedly to the farm (the belongings of an absolute lifetime), and she is now semi-settled in the cottage. The week preceding the move was pandemonium. The main house was still not plumbed, no sign of a kitchen, and even though we had chased some electrics through the walls, no plugs, no switches, no nada.

My precious antique German piano arrived from mom's house with absolutely no diginity, strapped to the back of a 4x4, over dust roads......and to my surprise (and delight), no additional scratches, and only the bottom C is slightly flat. Damn heavy - at least 6 strapping men to move this baby. Good job MuGuyver!

We managed to clear out the lounge, the bedroom and the bathroom in the main house - and then we moved like demons! On the last day of the move, I was still carting clothes, furniture, fritty little things, back and forth to try and clear the cottage so mom could at least move in and try to make it her own. The dogs were socialised ok I think, thanks to a final frantic call to Pat from Animals in Distress on how exactly to introduce these packs. In my wisdom, I thought I should lock my brood away, let her two dogs out, and then introduce the family one by one.

Pat said that was the worst thing I could possibly do, even though my pack is way bigger and perhaps more aggressive than mom's. Her logic was that this farm belongs to my dogs. They must be out and about, and mom's dogs must take the first step into this territory. Otherwise chances were very big that my dogs would land up killing the "foreigners". We did it Pat's way (I sent mom inside so she couldn't coddle and panic and yell and watch, sigh), and it went well. We are all fine now. Clever Pat!

Moving on. Just before the monumental move, we have this instant bladdy tornado-like wind. Calm one moment, hell the next. We watch in stupefied awe as the double car port slowly collapses onto my little car. Slow motion. Bugger. That poor little car. Stupid double car port.....

So mom is moved in the last day of November, the bull mastiff eventually decides after FOUR hours that perhaps she should get out of the car......send mom inside again.....out the mastiff gets (Magnolia-Mae, LOL), all is well. I did heave a big sigh of relief. It could have been a disaster, truth be told. Mom's dogs have NEVER been socialised. Phew. And there are NO vets in Magalies!

Next day, bright and early, bushy tailed.......have a sarmie with mom and dip all six dogs (mission!). It's 9'0'clock on the morning of the 1st of December. Then the stupid sarmie gives me indigestion. Bugger. Mom starts to faff, I get annoyed and go for a walk. But this damn "stone" in the middle of my chest is really sore. And it's spreading into my shoulders. And my hands are feeling weak. And my jaw feels a bit floppy. I do the right thing, mom makes a doctor appointment, and off I go....still feeling a bit stupid because really, the twelve teaspoons of Bi-Carb I drank just now should surely kick in. Yes?

Doctor does an ECG - and even I can see the man go pale. He gives me some little pill thing, and it was just about then that I felt very "out of this world". I heard phone calls, I heard "helicoptor might be faster than ambulance", and I am not feeling well. And I am getting scared.

Long story short - off to Flora Clinic, cardiologist waiting for me - they do some procedure where they stick a scope right up your artery from your groin and poke around in your heart (eeek - that felt so weird) - confirmed full-on heart attack and into ICU for days. WTF? I haven't even turned 45 years old yet. Crazy stuff. Hoping that meds will strengthen the heart muscle in the left coronary artery (which collapsed and stopped blood flow apparently), otherwise they will put a stent in. Sh*t.

Anyway - all done now - up the ying-yang with all sorts of heart meds. Read the inserts of the medication the other day - oh what a bad move - what was I thinking? Feeling tired, but good.

And now begins the work on the main house kitchen......and to get the bathroom up and running......but as you will see in the next few posts, we did good......nearly there for now!

Between all of this, I got tick bite fever. Then I sprained my ankle. Then mom fell up the stairs. Then mom got tick bite fever.

Bring on 2012. Please......

OCTOBER 2011 - TYING UP LOOSE ENDS

Well it certainly has been an interesting and stressfull year. Mom and I finally sold our house in Jozi, papers signed, deal done. She is moving into the cottage here on the farm, and the man and I will move into the main house. What a job. Main house has absolutely no plumbing or electrics chased in the walls, no bathrooms, no kitchen. Still have to install all the burglar bars and security gates to make it safe and the slate floor is a disaster. LOTS of work to be done.

The man has started to move mom and all her belongings, the gatherings of a lifetime. So much stuff. And she is stressing no end about bringing her two dogs here. One Mastiff and one Russell. Ah well, we will just have to cope. Live in harmony or bugger off, I say. (Meanwhile back at the ranch, I'm am also sh*tting myself at the initial introduction...)

The rains have come. A few flash storms which didn't do much, but now a nice fine rain has set in and it's really looking beautiful here. Farmer Brown mowed the lawn the other day in his ol' John Deere. Still having to drag it down the road to start it, but it does the job.

Patio of the main house looking a whole lot better with a built in bar and jet master braai place. We've used it a lot already - much fun!

I think we will make a lot of memories here.

Cottage - THEN and NOW (Jan 2011 to Oct 2011)

Ah what a sweet little cottage this turned out to be. It was so sad when we first got here. I reckon if the roof gets a lick of pine needle green paint, she'll be almost perfect!

A bit of trivia here.....the previous owner popped in for a visit. Said the rights things you know, like, ah, so much work done, looking good, etc etc. Told him I battled a bit through winter with all the plants dying, but we were trying our best to get all the shrubs and trees going again. He said "Ja, best you do, my dead ma's ashes are buried under that Cape May" and points to a bush that I thought was long dead. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! What a thing to say!

So with copious watering and pleading and classical music, I coaxed the bladdy thing back to life. Thank the Lord. It's the brilliant bush in the front of the pic with tons of pretty white blooms.

Shew! My nerves, I swear. Hope you're happy Mrs Harper. Just stay where you are.....

Whahahahahahaha!

29 September 2011 - ESKOM !!!!!!

Whoop whoop, happy dance of bladdy note. Eskom finally decided that perhaps we poor peeps deserved power. And they arrived en-masse to install it for us.

Then, in all their Eskomly wisdom, they promptly threatened to lock the power box they had just installed because we couldn't supply them with a Compliancy Certificate. WTF? The place is a shell. There is no wiring left, everything has been stripped. There is NOTHING to comply with, but if they lock that damned box, we can't even carry on fixing the place.

I stomp off to get my 38 - I am going to blow that damn lock straight off that box.

The man willingly liberates half his nursery stock (apparently electricians garden too), and by the time I get back, Eskom is gone and he is a happy Farmer Brown with a key in his hand.

It's a good week. Mom and I sold our house, my friend got a killer job.....yip, things are looking up indeed!

SEPTEMBER 2011 - GETTING READY FOR THE RAINS

Things are moving slowly along here on the farm, and the man has cunningly built three more dams without me even knowing. And now we have the threat of rain, and MANY dam walls that are not re-inforced, and probably not packed down hard enough to withstand any amount of rain coming down our river.

And so the panic begins. Thank heavens we have tons of trees lying around that the last idoits who stayed here chopped down and left lying everywhere. The man spends 3 days dragging huge logs down to the dams and making the walls stronger. Lots of work.

And the rain does not come......yet.....LOL!

Here's a quick YOU TUBE link showing Farmer Brown dragging a tree behind the faithful old 4x4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG49p12j6cA

WATCHING OUR DAM PROGRESS

ONE...

TWO....

THREE!

I thought it might be nice to see the progress of the dam. From the time the TLB's moved in to get rid of the bush and dig great big holes, to when the water started to arrive, and to now, as of September....what a clever Farmer Brown I have !!

Our borehole is sick!

Oh my word.......just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Look at what the borehole is spewing out! This is what was left behind after we ran a bath.....full of sand and silt. I hope the borehole isn't collapsing in on itself. What will we do out here in the sticks with no clean water?

Eish. Not good!!

Some BEFORE and almost-AFTER pics...Cottage Kitchen

Poor little cottage when we bought....

Luffly - stripped kitchen

Almost fitted - this is much better these days !

I think it's time to show a bit of the work that we've done here. I'll do it bit by bit, and start with the cold cottage. Still not done, no internal electricity cables ( we have to re-chase them with an angle grinder through the stupid walls) or switches (all ripped out and sold for scrap by moronic previous owners). Man also had to rebuild the staircase which was stolen, and there was once a fire place (I think a Jet Master) - gone too. Remember also there were no window panes, and 2 of the big windows were pulled out completely, just big gaping holes where once there were windows and frame. Same with kitchen door. Just a hole in the bricks.

Ok - we will start with the kitchen......

...But she forgot about my ol' John Deere...

Ah, memories are made of this.....

Brings back fond memories of my dear homie o'Richieeeeee - Richard Thompson - currently doing another long stint in the UAE with his band. He sings country that will rock your cotton picking socks right off.

This, friends, is how we start our John Deere (which I have learned recently is German, not American) because the starter motor is still stuffed.

And today, we have to be thankful for small mercies. Mercies like - oh, no, we don't have electricity yet, thank you Eskom....because the man ran over an electricity cable with the slasher, which promptly wound its stupid self around everything at the back of the tractor, and brought everything to grinding halt. Literally.

Very small video clip attached - quality bad, as usual ( but at least I managed to hurtle out the front door, no geese in sight).....

Sigh....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTr9_rwLYj0
WHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - I AM FINISHED!!

As if a tractor ain't enough...

Oh my hat. And it's the end of May. And life continues in the wild. So......we hire ANOTHER huge TLB machine because we need to get cracking on this dam we are building (but it's looking good so far me thinks), make campsites, etc ad nauseum. And the weekend comes....so the TLB owner decides to leave this monster machine with us, because really, even in the arse-end of the bush, nobody even in Africa is going to steal it. Are they?

Well......

The man decides, in his infinite manly-wisdom, that this earth moving giant can't be that difficult to operate. Can it?

And he steals it. Yip, he truely does.

What a farmer brown. How he managed to get up there in the first place is just beyond me. Let's not talk about operating it with only one leg (gasp). And its got a big scraper digging thing at the front and a big squashy thing at the back. And he PLAYS with it for a very long time. the chickens and Bartholomew and I barely escaped with our lives.

And all he did was make a humungous mess which we had to clean up by hand afterwards so the TLB dude wouldn't know his machine had indeed been hijacked, in the arse-end of the bush!

Bloody McGuyver. What next?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Gtl8wIWCs

http:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtF34kvq7xw

25 March 2011 - The New Dam

The man has decided to start a fishing lodge here instead of building some cottages and dealing with crappy tenants, and so the building of the dam commences. With great enthusiasm and admittedly, a whole lot of vision his part.

After two giant TLB's have scraped away what I believe to be a giant crater, and some river water is filtering in, we stand and gaze at the dam. And gaze some more. And then the man realises that the original dam wall was WAY further down and at least 15m higher than he first thought. What we have done is built a POND that may very well be washed away with the first threat of rain.

Back to the drawing board.

My nerves.....LOL!

Bean Queen! 11 March 2011

Whaaaaaa!!!! First "harvest" from the garden patch. Like a true farm-girl, I spend the evening by candle light washing and topping-and-tailing beans in the kitchen! Yay us.

However, there is a tiny bit of news to lay down before I go into the bean-queen story.....

Friday 11 March 2011 - the man has been in a terrible black mood. Nothing, but nothing can go right (even when it does). The puppy chews a cable to the generator so the makeshift power doesn't work. The man has to stumble around in the dark checking meters and meters of cable for a break. He braais. What else do you do when you have no working kitchen appliances? We have one piece of steak, and two pieces of gammon which we've been dying to turn into a meal. He cooks the gammons.....puts them in a braai pan on the table, pops on the steak and fixes the cable. Comes back to the braai, and Abigail has scoffed all the gammon. Generator promptly runs out of petrol. Joy.

Then he finally tells me that his right arm has been numb since Monday. Tit. Not something I should know?

I go to bed. He stays at the fire to sulk. Much later I hear a stupendous KA-THUMP. I listen.....nothing. Listen some more.....nothing. As I lie down again, I hear this voice calling out "I've fallen....but I'm ok". Lord have mercy. He has crashed down over the little make-shift "patio" outside the front door that I insisted we needed. But he says that his arm feels better. I think it's the beer.....

Sunday 13 March 2011 - yip, it was the beer. The arm is worse. So is the mood. He is going to play "boerevrou" with 2kg's of green beans and an ancient farm recipe from mom. I am going to visit my friend Sue.

I get back later in the day and our kitchen is filled to the brim with bottles and bottles of pickled green beans and onions. WTF? He smiles, looks at the floor and says "I swept". I look under the doggy food bowls on the floor, hehehehe, all the onions and beans are there.....like a kid who says they cleaned their room and they stuff everything under the bed. My turn to smile, and just get the broom.

Friends are good, beans are everywhere....he would be a good wife if he cleaned up!

PS : The arm? It was a spider bite......

The day everything changed..... :)

Well, the decision to move into the REAL sticks was made relatively quickly. Within a week, in fact. Signed sealed delievered....it's yours!

We made the huge step at the end of October 2010, and well, things have never quite been the same. It is rather late to start blogging about it now, but really, so much has happened that I feel guilty not writing it down.

Tears, laughter, disaster, everything. As I write, we are still sitting with no electricity, and no running water. We moved completely at the end of January this year. It's tough, make no mistake.

But here starts the story of our great move into the wilderness of the Magaliesburg, where, quite literally, nothing happens. Nada!

Introducing the Broke Down Farm - photograph taken on the day the offer-to-purchase papers were signed. Nice from far, hey? I am hoping someone comes on this ride with me....because it's been one hellava journey, and we're not halfway through it yet!