september 1990.
Resumed work on the house. Now that we were slightly rich again (and when was the last time before this?), this being the best year in recent memory, we got some more cement, gravel, sand and fired up the mixer. The entrance into the basement would always collect water. The staircase from Johan's door would be outside, in the rain and whatnot, so we started thinking about a way to shelter it. So we came up with a garage. It would start a meter ahead of this door, and go on beyond the terrace for more than a meter, thus being about 8m long - to compensate for its being so narrow. We came last to buy the lot seven years ago from that doctor, so we got the last lot, narrower than the others (Juliška's is the same). The last guy gets the ugliest girl.
The staircase was just hewn into the soil, repeatedly.
This garage we built ourselves - laid and poured the foundation, built the walls. Only next year a neighbor, a carpenter by trade, will put a roof on it. The roof leans partly on the wall above Johan's door, and the rest on the new wall.
Part of that wall sits on the edge of the terrace, which was laid on the basement wall, and since it would carry the upper end of the roof, it had to have some decent height, which gave it some indecent height on the corner extending beyond the terrace (partly visible on the second photo, when it was only half height), where it had its own foundation. I didn't have proper scaffolding for that, what I borrowed from stambena I returned long ago, so I improvised from blocks, barrels, planks. It's almost 4m tall on the corner, where the scaffolding laid on a block which was on a barrel. The barrel held some water in winter, which then froze and pushed the bottom out, so it wasn't flat, making it even more wobbly.
As Murphy would have it, the siporeks blocks we used on the bottom were from the top row of the heap, so they were dry and lightweight, perhaps about 7kg each. The higher it went, the heavier they got, to the point when they were ridiculously heavy, perhaps 30kg, having sat in the bottom row, on the ground, soaked full of water. Those went into the top two rows. How I got them up and positioned them properly without ever falling, not even dropping the fangla once, is beyond me.
Most of the time I wore a black t-shirt she brought from China, a souvenir with "I climbed the Great Wall" printed on it. In my case, it should say "I built the great wall".
Mentions: fangla, Juliška, siporeks, stambena zadruga, in serbian