Somewhere in Yunnan, China
Somewhere in Yunnan, China
The Giants Republic 2021
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No Christmas at the Giants Republic
We intended to invite friends for the Christmas weekend but then the weather forecast turned out to be very bad with lots of rain expected. The plan thus got cancelled and now we host some people just at home.
Renting a place at a strawberry farm has advantages like receiving a free basket of strawberries. So guess what our Christmas dessert will be?
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
Some time ago I found the remains of a bunk bed at the garbage dump site of our compound.
The thing was incomplete but as the picture below shows there was still enough material left over to make one bed.
The plastic door cover turned out to be a disappointment. It simply is not sticky enough and therefore it started peeling off.
Door frames
With the walls painted the doors and door frames now looked horrible.
The door frames were covered in plaster and didn't have cover slats. My friend however had a whole pack of cover slats once given to him and he didn't need them so they ended up at the Giants Republic. As the picture shows, after cutting and planing, there was just enough for the four upstairs doors.
To improve the doors I had bought stick on plastic door cover material and XY's mother, who is a specialist in this, XY claims, and her aunt put it on. The material however is to thin and not sticky enough for these doors but still from a distance it looks good; at least better than it was.
XY decided to paint the other doors.
Incidental art
The door slats, while being painted, rested on two pieces of polystyrene packing material. See pictures above.
When cleaning up the room afterwards we noticed that incidentally I had made an artwork.
We only have to frame them ;-)
Temperature
I know it is a bit obsessive but I like to measure everything.
Workshop electronics
The workshop didn't have electricity so we had to run power tools on an extension wire via the back window.
On a sunny day I installed a cable bridge between the house and the workshop. The tube is there to protect the cable against UV light.
Everything is double; one voltage stabilised grid and one un-stabilised grid.
Free furniture
Some time ago one of XY's friends offered us a lot of free furniture from her ex-husbands office and from a juwelry shop of one of her friends.
Because some of this material was standing in a public space and was blocking a corridor we had to move it fast.
We rented two guys with a small truck to move it because it was quite a lot and some of the stuff was pretty large.
The furniture was on two locations and had to go to two locations as well one being our compound where we donated a leather couch with two leather seats and table plus seven upright chairs to the office of the residence committee. XY can lay down on the couch now when they have a meeting there.
At our compound we picked up my three wheeler and then went to pick-up the jewellers shop furniture.
This included a 271 cm wide set of drawers and three display tables with glass tops.
Two of these tables were partly dismantled and I will use them as just working tables in the workshop. One I could fix and will use as a small museum.
The set of drawers is too large to make it up the stairs but can make it there via the roof. I am now making a hoisting contraption to get it on the roof and from there to the second floor. Pictures of this will follow when we will do this job. At the moment there are no strong men available to do the muscle work.
The deal included as well five kitchen chairs. They are very sturdy and don't keel over backwards like the previous ones did.
Ceiling matting
Quite some work went into fixing the ceiling in the big room upstairs. Actually not fixing it but covering it up with reed matting.
First 18 holes had to be drilled high up on the wall and it turned out that this part of the wall is actually rather strong concrete. But with the heavy duty hammer drill from my friend this was quite possible but the issue was that one stands on this rather flimsy scaffold which makes it a bit nerve wracking experience.
Next was putting up the metal cables. I used this kind of cable a lot before to hang up heavy paintings. In these cases I soldered loops on them and I did this again now.
However a stress test showed that my soldering points were not strong enough and some broke.
My friend suggested to just knot the cables. I had not thought of this before because the plain iron cable I used before is to though to knot, but this was stainless steel and it turned out to be much more flexible and therefor possible to knot. For the same reason my soldering hadn't worked. It works with plain iron but not with stainless steel.
However knotting takes a bit more cable and now my cables were too short to knot. Order thus new cable and wait for it to arrive. Anyway plenty of other things to do like gluing the matting at the cuts to stop it from unravelling.
The new cable came, we knotted it and installed it. All passed the stress test and finally we could hang the matting on the ceiling.
Kitchen
We have now an official kitchen in the place.
XY and her mother wallpapered the place with anti-splash aluminium stick-on foil and that is as much as we did to create it. The kitchen zinc is outside in the open.
Sometimes things work out fine. The plastic drawers, given by XY's aunt, the kitchen counter with a table top of three tiles given by my friend and the shelves, given by XY's niece, exactly fit along the wall.
The top of the dining table in the middle I got for free from somebody because its wooden frame was broken. It sits on a frame from another table I found in the garbage of our home's compound of which the table top was severely damaged. These two pieces fit exactly together as well. But, nothing for nothing; the marble table top weights some 80 Kg and I had to contract somebody to carry it down 5 flights of stairs for me and put it into the bus.
International
The kitchen has quite some international inhabitants.
The drinking water Jerrycan is from Australia, the toasty maker from New Zealand.
One drawer contains a chef's knife bought during a holiday in Germany. And tea spoons from several airlines.
Some items have history as well.
The coffee grinder I was given in Bosnia in 1992.
The mocha cups were brought from Egypt by my father when he did the practical part of his study there in 1956.
Tuin "Winterklaar" maken
Sorry but this a joke in Dutch that cannot be translated.
XY deed een Jacobse & van Esje en de tuin is nu "Winterklaar".
The grape vine is the only thing left but is more or less dead.
To green things up a bit XY wants climbing plants all over the ugly grey walls.
Till now that task was left to our single ivy plant. We had two but one died.
Clearly our ivy could not do the task alone so XY splashed out quite some money on various climbing plants.
Like nearly everything we buy here they were bought on the internet. When they arrived it became my task to plant them.
Planting is however not easy because the whole place is covered in concrete.
In order to grow anything in our courtyard we first have to break a hole in the concrete.
For this I used a big hammer drill from my friend and a technique I learned 58 years ago at kindergarten called "Prikken" or piercing.
At the time I found this technique to be cumbersome, inefficient and boring but now 58 years later I finally understand why we spend so many hours at it; it is the right method to create holes in concrete pavement.
National day camping trip
The first of October is National Day in China and the first day of the National Day Golden Week, the third official holiday of the year.
At last moment we were invited to attend a camping trip to a place just north of Kunming.
Our camping equipment however was all at the Giants Republic.
We improvised using my 42 year old winter tent and XY's yoga matt with our normal bedding.
I put up the tent which was last used some 5 years ago and we were ready to camp.
However the camping place charged a ridiculous amount of money per tent for a place that was some two kilometres away from the very poor facilities so everybody decided to go back the same evening. It was thus a non-camping camping trip.
A large part of this camping we went to are actually allotments that you can rent. The speciality here is that you don't have to look after them, they have professional staff to do that for you. Just instruct them to grow something and they will do so. You only have to harvest.
Painting
I had not planned to do much painting but then I found these two big buckets of old paint next to our waste bin. After that I found two brand new paint rollers as well and took this as a divine sign that some painting had to be done.
This room never had been painted before. The bare plaster sucks up lots of paint and therefor I had not enough white for the walls as well.
The other barrel turned out to be coloured. I had not realised that because all the pigment had sunk to the bottom in this nine year old paint
By mixing all the latex paint I still had together, I still had a few litres from when XY's office got painted, I had enough to paint one more room.
I added a bit of black latex paint I still had from our own house and the colour now became more or less like the original colour of the wall so one layer of paint was sufficient. Don't know what the colour is. One of the 50 shades of grey. But it looks good also on these pictures it just looks grey but it has hind of yellow/green in it.
This is the room of which the ceiling has come down. Plan is to cover the ceiling with reed matting.
To stop the white from the remaining pieces of ceiling shining through I painted these grey.
I hope this works the plaster and old paint on the ceiling is of a very bad quality and might peel off again.
Second BBQ
During our first BBQ we were invited by our landlady to join them picking wild mushrooms.
This time a second high school friend of XY joined us as well.
Now with the landlady and her husband we were seven and in addition to the hotplate electric BBQ we used the gas BBQ as well.
This gas BBQ I bought second hand for 50 euro and that includes a full big gas bottle.
First BBQ
The bunk bed below had to be ready for our first guest at our first BBQ. They had to carry the bed upstairs as well since I could not do this by myself.
Bunk bed
On the second-hand group I found a bunk bed with two mattresses for very little. When I tried to assemble it again I found out that the holes in the wood of the frame were worn out and that something had to be done to make the bed safe. So my welding equipment moved as well to the place and I welded the hooks on some metal plates and L profiles.
Last week I found out that there is still livestock at the farm and well inside this old agricultural machine.
By now I rent the place but even before that I started to clean the place up.
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