Doing Doors: Etseri, Svaneti
A building project up here in the middle of nowhere can be a daunting prospect, where materials, skilled labor and equipment might be few and very far between. Take my garage. My father in law and brother in law came about 600 km from Kakheti to build its walls; not because no one else could, of course, but just to help us out.
The roof was added a year later, by two local men who have "putting in two small windows" as part of their agreed role; we’re still waiting a year later, despite much pleading.
But the doors... two big main ones through which I'll drive the 4x4, and a small personal one? The sheet steel and other components for them I bought in Zugdidi, 110 km below us, about two years ago, following my father in law's instructions. There's a big metal bazaar there. The only thing is, you have to buy things in certain minimum amounts. If you want a 6 mm thick steel sheet of a particular size, cut, you have to buy the perhaps several square meters extra which it came from; they don't store and sell off-cuts, more's the pity. It can get expensive! Now we want to have the thing lockable, before the onset of yet another winter, so we can, you know, PUT stuff into it.
So the doors' designer and builder are separated by about 600 km and two years. Would things still line up? More or less; the builder decided that we were short a few 90-degree angle irons of various lengths, so I made a special Saturday trip to Zugdidi, public transport from our village being the cheapest and most convenient way to do this, and ordered them, paid, picked them up, and delivered them home.
Then began a lengthy welding process, for which my "puny" 400 GEL welding machine was inadequate; another neighbor's ancient, heavy monster one was called for, one which takes so much electricity that they had to wire it straight into the house mains. What a saga!
The builder even made a platform of logs and planks at working height so he could weld in comfort without having to bend to the ground; he and his university-age son did the lifting while I was out. I returned, and two huge, ponderously weighty main doors were assembled, leaving us (me, at least) to consider how we would move them into position for the critically accurate step of welding the doors, hinges and frame to each other.
The son left for Tbilisi; he's about to start a uni course in Ukraine. So I asked a couple of other neighbor lads to help with the remaining heavy work. They soon appeared.
Lift onto concrete blocks; lever, wedge, stabilize; rinse and repeat, getting ever closer to the level in all three dimensions, and fixing each door there. It was a good demonstration of using mechanical advantage to do jobs both much too heavy and too exacting for one or two people alone, brains winning over brawn. I was impressed; he's clearly done this many times before!
Welding four hinges into place seemed almost trivial compared to what had just gone before, but I could see myself getting this, too, badly wrong, and ending up with two doors fixed and unable to move at all, or welded to each other, or some other such travesty. In my workman's hands it went smoothly; or at least if anything went awry and needed him to repair it, he coolly kept this knowledge from me, which was also fine.
He added a mechanical lock from the inside, so that these doors can't be unlocked at all from outside; my idea, but he agreed that it was useful because, after all, the main lock can be on the smaller, person-size door. Which we'll get to once my wife and I return from a few days' trip to her people in Kakheti. And THEN... not only the car, but a whole houseful of tools will have its permanent 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 1350 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
Tony Hanmer