diary of a zambian housewife: August 2006

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Anyone for a swim??!!!

"Come on in the water's lovely!"

Hmmmm, well, after three and a half days of filling we're there......................only problem, we appear to have accidentally filled our pool with dark green sludge with a delicate hint of brown.....................lovely!!!!! But hey! It was still lovely to get in the pool again, refreshing, invigorating, we had a great swim! Come and join us! Ok, we're kidding.......the shock packs are in and we wait for clarity.....................watch this space!

Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Last Day

Well, here it is! Wednesday 23rd August! The plastering was finished by about 2pm! We started filling straightaway! (It's Thursday 10.30am at this moment and the water's only just lapping against the shallow end wall!) We hope the pool will be filled by tomorrow night although the water will be quite dirty and we'll then have to treat it. The colour should actually be fine as it's already slightly darker when it's wet and has a nice look to it! Can't wait for a swim!!!!! We're now busy filling in around the remaining areas, above the piping, with red laterite, black soil and finally grass. So the next photo I post on here should show a sparkling clear pool with everything looking much tidier all around it!

Welcome back Gordon!

Before work began on the pool we traced our original 'Gordon the gecko' on massive, sellotaped together, pieces of paper! Thus, when the time came, the 'paper Gordon' was positioned in the new pool and a team of us traced his shape with chalk! Omari and his guys then sprang into action on day 17 of the job (which was actually Tuesday 22nd Aaugust!), mixed plaster, tinted it and produced a perfect Gordon for us!

The next day, Wednesday 23rd August, was D-Day! They guys started at 7am, mixing the plaster in the deep end of the pool and tinting it. We used pva paint for the tint, mixed with white cement and marble dust. We had a little difficulty selecting the colour as we actually didn't know we were going to need pva paint for tinting until the night before we did Gordon! So we had a last minute panic rush job, frantically trying to decide on the colours which would give an end result of "light grey rock colour....................with Gordon slightly darker............." Hmmm....tricky! Honestly? We probably didn't get it quite right because Gordon's definitely 'feeling a bit blue' and, as you'll see in the next posting, the rest of the pool is quite light, although definitely grey.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Happy Birthday Gaz!

It's my brother Gary's birthday today, 42!
Last night he & Kathryn (his fiancee) went out to dinner with Mum & Dad in Ma & Pa's new silver Toyota Rav4! Oooooeeee! Mum & dad are getting rather cool in their old age!!
Hope they had a nice time anyway!
Gary & Kathryn are actually getting married next year, 2007, on July 28th at Eilean Donan Castle on the beautiful Isle of Skye!
So, here's my little experiment..............sharp-eyed readers of my blog may have noticed the adverts at the top of the page..............they tend to be travel ads for Zambia due to my constant ramblings about our trips in Africa.
Suddenly they became a veritable feast of swimming pool construction ads - wonder why?!
So now, in one posting, I've mentioned: birthdays, the Toyota Rav 4, weddings and Eilean Donan Castle - wonder what turn the ads will take.....? It will be interesting to see.........................
Maybe I should just start blogging about the most odd things I can think about (shouldn't be hard I know!) just for the fun of seeing which ads come up!
Well at least if I start ranting about odd stuff at some point you'll know why!

Patience is a virtue................

Yeah well, we're not that virtuous and we started to get impatient after about a week!

So anyway, we decided to try and get some grass laid. The bottom photo shows Fred putting black soil down and the top photo shows Patrick (left) and Fred finishing one whole section of grass! (nicked from the front verge - we'll worry about what to do with the verge later!)

They did this from Wednesday 16th to Friday 18th August.

Hard to believe there were pool steps and the old pool right where they're standing only two and a half weeks ago!

So now we await the final stage..............................................!

Day 14....then.....nothing............!!!

At this point we've got the old pool walls bashed away at the top and red laterite filled in between the old pool walls and the new pool walls. The pool guys then pretty much did a 'disappearing act' as they're waiting for 'the boss' to come from lusaka with the white cement for the finishing. This was Tuesday 8th August.