We begin to understand the importance of good fences....and Charl wonders what he has bought

On our first visit to the farm, once we had officially taken transfer, we wandered up towards the small dam we knew we owned, at least according to the agent's advertisement. There we saw two men, a farm worker and a man who glowered at us through steely blue eyes under a peaked cap. They were very busy doing fencing and working with rolls of barbed wire. As we approached the men, the one in the cap turned towards us and without a greeting said he was the neighbour and that he was correcting the boundaries. He said that the fence line was wrong and he was moving the fence. He said Groenewald, from whom we had both bought, ran the two farms together and we did not own any of the dams as they were positioned on our respective boundary. The boundary line ran through both the top and bottom dams, he said and ours was a tiny portion of water. When we asked him what he was basing his new fence line on, he replied vaguely that his wife had the farm diagram with the correct boundaries on it. We asked if we could please see it at some time and he said she was away and he did not know where it was. We tried to be friendly but were met with the cold response, 'I don't know where you think you are going to get your water from.' Much taken aback by this country welcome we retreated to our cottage and as we had to leave the following day to go back to Cape Town we resolved on our return to meet the neighbour's wife and look at the diagram. When we next returned to the farm, we walked up to the dam and were horrified to find a barrier of barbed wire strung right through the water. Not only that but the fence line all along our boundary had been hastily moved in by one metre, stretching right up the mountain, where the boundary stone piles had been moved. A one metre distance divided the new stone piles and the remains of the old rusted fence line that had burnt in the mountain fire. Arnold , who was still around came and showed us the old fence line and verified all the new stone piles were incorrectly positioned, giving the neighbours one more metre width to their land. As our farm was a long thin piece of land it made it look all the more obvious and ridiculous. There and then we decided to pay a visit to our neighbour to try and sort out this matter. First we removed the barbed wire in the dam for fear of water birds being trapped or harmed by it. We never did get to see the famous correct diagram, despite trying to visit our neighbours on a couple of occasions and in the end we decided to press on with our home renovations and tackle the boundary issue at a later stage. We would eventually go to the authorities in Bredasdorp who told us we had every right to move the fence back to its original position, which we did about five years later.

Over the next few months we went to the farm every second weekend and in the holidays while concentrating on getting some sort of plumbing installed and the interior more livable. The house had no running water or bathroom. We found a local bricklayer in Baardskeerdersbos, a coloured man named Jims who came and worked on and off, as his alcohol intake dictated. We were very dependant on him and slowly with hard work from Charl, managed to put in a small bathroom which had a small old ball-and-claw bath we retrieved from one of our fields. Arnold, who had lived in our house and had moved to a farm higher up the Tierfontein road, had without asking us intended to take the bath with him, hence us finding it in a field. We also put in a shower with a mosaic pebble floor made of pebbles found at nearby Pearly Beach and a gas geyser which could operate on low water pressure. Establishing our water source for our house was to become one of those learning curves that no-one in the city ever experiences. The topic of water is one that would be returned to again and again! For the moment the house had dam water, but the water pressure from gravity flow was not strong enough to push through the geyser and as we had no electricity to run a pump, we were reliant on gravity. There was a pool of clean water higher up above the two dams where the furrow fed into our property at the base of the mountain, but it fell just on the other side of the neighbours fence. Arnold told us that was where he got water from for nine years and there was a small 20ml pipe in the furrow already so we used this to bring water down to our house. In our kitchen we installed a square porcelain sink which we bought at a builders yard in Salt River and we built stone surrounds to resemble a rustic Greek style sink. Wanting to keep all the fittings in character with the old house we also bought an old enamel basin and recycled taps for the bathroom, something we later learnt was not a good idea, as they could not easily be maintained. From time to time Charl would get overwhelmed and frustrated teaching himself plumbing and trying to figure out how to get enough water volume to the house, as we bought endless filtering devices and black pipe from the farmers co-op. We also spent ages figuring out how to stop frogs and grit from blocking the pipe. Home made shade-cloth netting over the pipe inlets seemed to work the best.

The pitch black Kitchen - before

...and after a coat of paint and the new sink is installed

Inspired by Tricia Guild's bright colours, I busied myself painting the three rooms of the house, choosing an orange ochre for the voorkamer with lime green and dark turquoise wood work, while the bedroom was painted lilac blue and lime green. We laid a cement floor in the bedroom and in the voorkamer, all the old linoleum was lifted off the weak, crumbling cement base. We painted the floors to resemble flag stones in a pale yellow ochre-sandstone colour which was very successful. The kitchen was painted white to rid it of the dreadful burnt brown walls, and I painted the bits of furniture we picked up in second-hand shops in Ultramarine blue. In the attic of the house we found some old broken three-quarter beds which we repaired and an old rickety passage table we affectionately call to this day 'the Tricia Guild table'. All the wood work in the house we distressed with lots of bright colours and this little table we found in a ready made distressed state just like Tricia Guild would have painted. In the process of painting the walls we learnt a lot about what people tried to do in the old days to conquer the problem of damp! The moment enamel paint was invented it must have seemed like a cure all, as all the walls had copious coats of it, and in the bedroom there were layers of different wall papers all peeling and damp under another layer of enamel. Vinyl or linoleum must have seemed just as much a godsend as enamel and it was laid right over floors of bare earth with roots coming through it. One could have done an archaeological survey with all the different linoleum patterns used. We used PVA paint on the walls, but eventually this too peeled off and in the end the best solution has been to use lime wherever possible, sealing the surface between the enamel and lime with a bonding liquid solution. We learnt to live with damp marks as long as the walls were not wet and over the years with enough ventilation and proper trenching around the outside to keep the water away from the house, the walls are all dry. Our house was not built with any cement foundations and has koffieklip rock foundations above the ground on which thick walls of sun dried mud bricks were packed. We even found the wooden mould that was used to make the bricks, lying in a pit at the back of the house. Between the voorkamer and the bathroom was a small passage way room we referred to as the rat piss room. It was named thus because it smelt so terrible that we could not get the smell of rats out of it no matter how many coats of paint we applied over the pale existing turquoise walls. The smell of rat piss had penetrated far into the floor and only after we had put a thin cement screed on it and painted it did the smell go, but the name stayed! This room was painted a pale red ochre and the bathroom leading off it was painted in mid-blue and white stripes with a little yellow window, to try and give the tiniest room in the house some character.

The Voorkamer before painting

...and afterwards

There were only three small Georgian sash windows in the entire cottage, one in the kitchen, which had a few panes cemented over where they had been broken, one in the voorkamer and one in the bedroom. The rooms were badly in need of some more light, so in time we put two more matching small pane windows in the bedroom and kitchen. We had the bedroom window custom made to bring in as much of the outside view as possible. This involved having a large horizontal window made with two opening sections, but no middle section to the frame, so that when both sides opened there was nothing to bisect the view. It still had small panes so even though it was a big window, it would not look out of place with the other windows. Charl and Jims planned to spend one weekend putting it in. What we thought would be a quick job turned into a week long exhausting episode as it turned out that unbeknown to us the wall had been rebuilt at some point in the house's history using firebricks laid in English bond. This meant that not only was the wall as hard as rock because of the hard fired bricks, but because of the English bond, which has bricks in double depths set at different angles, it took a very long time to just make even the smallest hole. After a few broken hammers, many sore muscles, sweat and copious amounts of red brick dust, the hole which needed to span virtually the entire length of the wall was complete and the window was set into the wall. The kitchen window would only come a while later and in anticipation I painted an imitation window and view through it, on the wall, which reminded us of what we could look forward to. The hard effort of the bedroom window paid off and we had a beautiful wide view of the landscape which we could view from our bed. I painted it an acid lime green which worked fantastically with the pale violet blue of the walls.

Dreaming of a new kitchen window

Charl began to create a garden for us starting with windbreaks. We had wind belting at us from all angles, and we had to plant tall trees and shrubs if any sort of garden was to be established. What was very difficult was deciding which views to sacrifice. We argued a bit about it as I was in favour of views and Charl was in favour of windbreaks. In the end he convinced me by saying you can't have everything and we could have views in between the wind breaks which would act as frames for the pastures and mountain. We planted an indigenous small tree called Tarchonanthus camphoratus to start with, to block out the winter North Westerly winds. For the South Easter summer wind we planted Cupressus arizonica with a view to clipping it into a curved hedge. We still had no fences around the house or anywhere except on the boundary of the farm and we were really enjoying the openness of it all. Grass still grew right up to the back door, but slowly Charl created flower beds starting at the front door and extending along the walls of the house and then outwards. There was an old sick Peach tree at the front door which occasionally gave a few peaches and we left it there for a while. Mostly the baboons got the peaches first, or the worms. It finally grew so old and full of dead wood that we cut it down and planted a Turkish oak, Quercus serris. We designed the garden together with Charl doing most of the spade work. We gravelled paths and left the front garden to develop into a mixture of cottage and meadow garden. Because of the dry hot windy summers we had to plant hardy Mediterranean plants many of which have grey foliage and flowers in shades of purple, lavender and blue. We could only water whenever we came to the farm and Charl put a basic dripper irrigation system in which worked very well when it was not blocked by all the silt in the water. Old fashioned roses and English roses did suprisingly well in the front garden and gave the most spectacular spring show once they had grown into mature plants.

A bit of history...and how we found our farm

When we bought our farm in the Southern Overberg thirteen or so...ish years ago, the village of Baardskeerdersbos was unheard of. It was a tiny hamlet with a handful of families who had lived and worked the land as small subsistence farmers and inter-married for over 100 years. The village family names included the Groenewalds, Fouries, de Kocks and Mathees . On the outer-lying farms adjacent to the village were to be found the families, de Wet, Uys and Swart. Inside the village no outsider could purchase land or property as all the smallholdings were combined in a family trust which prevented outside ownership. When all this was considered we felt very lucky to have stumbled upon our little farm tucked in a valley 6 km outside the village, in an area called Tierfontein....

How we found our farm.

In 1995 we decided to start looking for a small piece of land that Charl could grow cut flowers on. We were living in Cape Town at the time and one Sunday as we looked through the property pages of the news paper we spotted a small advertisement for a farm near Pearly Beach. The ad read that the farm had a small cottage on it and a dam and consisted of 68 hectares of land, of which 10 were arable and the rest were fynbos and mountain. Although Pearly Beach seemed miles away we phoned the estate agent and got brief directions which included a lot of gravel roads, dams and red roofed houses as landmarks. We knew we had to take the turn off on the dirt road opposite Pearly Beach, and to look for a new large dam and a red roofed house. So off we set that same Sunday. Needless to say we got very lost, and after numerous wrong turns down overgrown sand roads and an encounter with a very large puff adder we finally realised that what was meant by the 'new dam' was the farm called Nieuwedam Farm opposite the Tierfontein road and the 'rooi dak huisie' was in fact the small cottage of our farm. It was it seemed the only house with a red roof and was clearly seen nestling in a large meadow surrounded by bright green kikuyu grass, with a huge dead gum tree standing over it as sentinel. We thought it looked wonderful, like a combination of Wales meets Tuscany, only a bit shabbier.

The 'Rooi Dak Huisie'

On the outside the small rustic red roofed cottage had cement coloured walls made from stipple plaster work and a deep pitched red painted corrugated iron roof. The roof was almost more in volume than the house itself.As we approached we saw there were a lot of dogs hanging around. We knew that Arnold the farm labourer lived there, and they were all his dogs, border collie crosses and other mongrel breeds, some tied to trees with rope, others just sitting around. There was the sound of plaintive yelping coming from inside the cottage which sounded like a puppy crying and crying. We knocked on the door, but it appeared no one was at home. I was desperate to get to the crying dog, so in we removed the makeshift cardboard cover over a panel of the front door and entered into a very dark interior front room. In a long tall cardboard box was a small black and white puppy scrambling up against the box sides and yelping as though its heart would break. I picked it up and found a bowl of some mashed potatoes on a table next to the box and started to feed it. It ate hungrily and I held it a bit, but realised this was some one else's animal and it looked in good condition and it was just lonely and the owners were probably out at church and would be returning soon. We looked around at the tiny black interior of the cottage which had a small kitchen with walls blackened by wood smoke and soot. There was an old Dover stove in a bakoond but it had no flue so whoever lived there just made a fire in the stove and all the smoke came out and filled the whole interior covering the walls and ceilings. The ceilings we noticed between the black soot consisted of heavy wood beams with reeds between them. The voorkamer were we had entered into through the front door was crammed full of vinyl covered furniture against the walls which were covered in a discoloured beige enamel paint. There were bright red and black bold patterned carpets on the floor. The one bedroom which led off the voorkamer had a mixture of old floral wall paper and beige paint and pictures cut out of women's magazines plastered on the walls. There was a horrible damp smell and the floor looked like bare earth. There were two single beds in the room piled high with clothes and a double bed separated by a curtain. Off the voorkamer leading to the back was a small room which stank of rat urine and a small turquoise coloured dirty bathroom. There was another door leading further on, but it was bricked up. This led to a large room at the back of the cottage which had caved in and all that was left were a few mud brick walls. What was so appealing about the whole cottage despite its dismal interior were the very thick walls, obviously made from mud brick, the old sash windows of oregon pine with their wide interior window sills, the yellow wood beam and reed ceilings and low oregon pine doors, and besides all the dinginess I just knew it was filled with potential, even though it looked like Charl would take some convincing. The house was obviously very old and full of cracks and creaks, but with a lot of love and a few licks of paint I knew we could turn it into something wonderful. And besides we had a whole 68 hectares to look at, with a fynbos mountain, and a dam...as far as we were concerned the house was a bonus! So we took a break under an old fig tree near by while we considered which way to explore next.

The hundred year old Fig tree

Painting of the fig tree

Our little cottage in a sea of grass, as it originally looked when we bought the farm in 1995A short walk....

After we had settled the puppy and carefully closed up the cottage we walked past a very old Willow tree with a child's swing attached to it, uphill towards the mountain and the dam which was situated about 500 metres above the cottage on a slope. We saw first a very large dam with a big hole in it and not much water, and upwards of this was a smaller dam which we assumed must be the small dam which came with the property. Above and behind the dam was a fence separating the 10 hectares of arable land from the mountain. The estate agent had told us that two years before there had been a big fire which had swept across the mountain and burnt much of the fynbos and a small pine tree forest in its wake. The mountain was still scarred but showed signs of new life with beautiful little fynbos flowers all over it. We sat under a few remaining tall Pine trees and looked back towards the red roof of the cottage beyond where it was nestled in a field of Kikuyu grass with cows grazing around it. We saw the still dark water of the dam and the bright blue sky reflected in it, heard the sounds of birds and we looked at the uninterrupted views beyond of gentle green fields and sloping hills. It was very lovely and we were so excited, we knew we just had to buy it. We had no idea how far the property stretched up the mountain, but we knew it must be quite far if the remaining 58 hectares were all mountain. We also did not have anyone to explain the boundaries as the estate agent had not come with us. We just knew we had found a piece of heaven with no noise or city life and we rushed back in the car to Cape Town to phone the agent to say we had to have it.

The farm becomes ours...

When we returned to Cape Town and we had negotiated a price for the farm, we started to make the necessary adjustments to our lives which included Charl selling his share as a partner in the Cape Town based landscape business LM Garden Design (Laubscher Moore Garden Design) and him moving from Devils Peak to Observatory. We kept our two respective houses in Cape Town as a base as we knew it would be a few years before we could move to the farm permanently. When the sale went through in January 1995 Charl set off to the farm to take a long hard look at the rooi dak huisie and what was needed to make it habitable. I was a bit cowardly at this point and what with all the spiders, webs, rats and snakes that abounded I thought this was decidedly a mans job! He took a further man called Simon with him and later when they returned and Charl told me how Simon slept the whole night with his candle burning to keep the rats away from his feet, I knew I had made the right decision! He and Simon cleaned and scrubbed and dusted years of blackened soot and dust from the yellow wood ceiling beams and from the spaans reit (Spanish reed) ceiling. The ceilings and corners of the rooms had spider webs as thick as mist from all the daddy-long-legs and the walls were as black as pitch. Arnold, the farm labourer who had previously lived there for nine years with his wife and small family, had never been given a pot of paint to paint the interior walls and the traditional Dover stove in the kitchen on which they cooked had no flue to take the smoke up the chimney, so it filled the tiny house and coated all the surfaces every time they made a fire. The following weekend I accompanied Charl and we took a plasterer who was aptly named General to tackle all the cracks in the walls and the non existent floors which consisted of earth covered over with linoleum. On our first night Charl and I decided to assemble two old World War II camp beds for ourselves in the bedroom filled with the cut out lady pictures and smelling of damp and fresh earth from the floor. General slept in the voorkamer. We had paraffin lanterns and candles and we had cooked our supper earlier on a fire under the stars . We collected water from the dam to wash the dishes and for our own ablutions and we marvelled at how quiet and tranquil it was in the country.

Noises in the kitchen...

We put out our candles and paraffin lamps and snuggled into our ancient and wobbly camper beds while listening to the outside sounds of frogs and insects as a wildlife night orchestra took over. Calls of owls and night jars added to the bliss. About half an hour after our lights went out I heard this rustling of many small feet on the ceiling above us and the tiny squeaking of little furry creatures. In the kitchen, which was a doorway and the small voorkamer away from our bedroom, I heard a gentle plop, plop as one by one as the furry creatures with the rustling feet lowered themselves from the brand solder attic, through the burnt ceiling reeds in the corner and down the the wall onto a corner shelf. Charl had worked hard the whole day and was dead tired, in addition to being blessed with that enviable male attribute of falling asleep the moment his head hits the pillow. I lay awake quite undecided as what to do, as well as being terrified at the thought of having furry rodents running over me during the night. Plucking up the courage I picked up the torch and crept into the kitchen. There I saw our plastic shopping packets which we had put on the one and only corner shelf on the wall, spilling open with trails of bread and biscuits and fruit distributed over the floor. Of the culprits there was no sign. I quickly learnt that they had a maddening habit of being able to vanish into thin air the moment they sensed a human was moving in their direction. All I could do was carefully close the kitchen door on its rickety hinges, leaving the rodents to their midnight feast, in the hopes that none would make their way through to us and that there would be some bread left over for our morning meal.