What's in Store: Etseri, Svaneti

After much debate, looking at many issues and sides with some trepidation... my wife and I have decided to re-open The Shop in our home.

The main change is that we won't extend credit to anyone anymore, having learned the hard way that this can lead to a huge buildup of unpaid bills and plenty of bad feeling between us and the debtors. Too much stress!

We also took advantage of my brother in law's recent visit, with his surprise wife, to use an extra pair of hands around the house. Not only did we perform some boyhood-recollecting water works in the ground ice to channel melt runoff from flowing into the garage; not only did we dig out a lot of planks wintering under about four feet of snow; we also built a huge new set of shelves to expand the space of The Shop. My wife is now happily stocking them and fulfilling one of her dreams for this enterprise.

The added space is about, let's see, 15" wide by 115" long times 5 shelves, equaling 8625 square inches, or nearly 60 square feet, or 9.3 square meters! We used a circular saw a few times, handsaw, axe, nails and hammer, tape measure, set square, level and not much else, with a lot of careful planning to get it right. Measure once (or, the Georgians say, a hundred times), cut once.

In the end, we decided not to use any of the "unearthed" planks, as they're pretty rough and uneven, and my wife reminded me that there was a much better source up in the attic, sitting unused. My precious, golden, solid, nicely stacked and air-dried elm planks, two whole cubic meters of them, waiting several years now to be turned who knows when into the interior of my long dreamt of sauna. I bit the bullet and allowed about twelve of them to go into the new shelving system. The sauna? Still to come, but not next on the renovation and building list anyway. We still need to add two floors of south-facing balconies; finish the entire exterior of the house and garage; consider a gazebo; do landscaping and ground works to channel water better; and more.

The Shop has proven itself to be of huge benefit to Etseri, and my wife likewise has shown herself to be a more than capable manager of its growth and flourishing. So many of the villagers begged us to reopen it, even with no credit extended, that we can now remind them of their own condition. Who gets credit when they go from here to shop in Mestia, say, or Zugdidi? No one! Learn to save in your own neighborhood, too!

I'll play the bad guy and remind people of the no credit thing when necessary; I'll drive down to the main road and pick up stock from distributors passing through if they can't come up to the house, though the road up will soon be ice-free. I'll haul boxes as required, too; and she'll manage the day to day running of the whole thing, and the accounts, at which I'm basically hopeless.

The huge freezer we bought second-hand upon moving here is plenty large enough for frozen goods, so there's little we can't stock, space and budget being the only constraints.

We've also learned well what items are our bestsellers and which might take longer to move, how long towards the sell-by date we dare to go with which perishables, and so on.

And now, let the word go out, we're open once again for business!

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