Jerrymandering: Etseri, Svaneti
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One of our more unusual guests appeared recently. He was on foot, with a small backpack, American, alone, for lunch initially. During the course of the acquaintance process he let drop that he was a carpenter and general handyman who would work for room and board. He also had no firm plans to be anywhere by any time, so if we needed his services, we might be able to come to an arrangement.
My wife and I talked. Such a person could certainly make himself useful around our place; we were writing the mental lists already. If he proved able to do what we needed, with the tourist season winding down anyway, there was much he might do to help winterize the place and also accomplish some special projects.
Drill a hole through our bedroom wall through which to insert the satellite dish-to-TV cable? (Without damaging the new stucco more than the hole itself!) Check, once I’d borrowed the required foot-long masonry bit from my neighbor. Weatherproof the new concrete windowsills so that water wouldn’t get into them, freeze, and damage them? There are a couple of options we’re batting around, of which the most likely to succeed seems to be a simple waterproof paint job rather than the also suggested sheets of galvanized steel, which might be unsealable, thus keeping moisture in where we don’t want it rather than shielding against it.
Make a small test run gazebo! Not the full-size one seating 20 or so which we want on the south side of the house, but a separate one near the main gate, to see what he can do, and it’d also be really useful there as a stop point for passers-by, local or tourist.
He had plenty of good wood of all sizes and shapes to choose from, and pretty well all the power tools he could want. (The circular saw would better have been replaced by a bandsaw or table saw, but it would do.) We talked dimensions, height, materials at hand and needed, power needs, and so on, and it began to come together. I helped when necessary and available (between ferrying the last of the season’s guests around).
The thing is finished now, the 5th structure on our land which originally only had house and barn, and all of them now corrugated metal-roofed. Solid, heavy, elegant but also rustic enough to fit in to its setting. A fine addition.
Next? Maybe a workbench for me in the garage, somewhere to do further light projects, somewhere to which I might attach my vise at last! Protecting the 1000L water container in the garage from cold with a small insulated enclosure which we could heat with a simple incandescent light bulb (before those are all gone off the shelves). Re-doing the main entrance steps to the house, removed by the stucco guys last month as a necessary part of their work… in wood, metal (done by locals as he doesn’t weld) or concrete block? Even some little roofs to cover those entrances so you no longer get rained or snowed on while entering, and so the snow doesn’t build up there in the first place? Oh, we can certainly put him to use in these couple of months max before the snow arrives and changes everything. Jerry, welcome to your new home away from home.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer