We took the opportunity to take out another 5 square meters of paving, which gave us 20 square meters of paving blocks ready to be layed. We'll take out another 5 square meters for the weekend and should be able to get a more noticeable section of the driveway next to the garage block paved.

Getting around to the driveway garden next to the house, we discovered they had managed to move the wire protection away from the plants there and chomped them all down to ground level. We're just not making headway with our garden plants. And although the eland were responsible for the demise of the plants, we can't really blame them. There's not much food out there in the veld left for them now and they must be very hungry. Their condition has noticeably deteriorated and ribs are showing on most of them.

Later in the afternoon, looking out towards the hillside there were eland for as far as you could see. They do honour the log fence boundary when we're there but seem to take their chances when we're not!

A nine wheelbarrow river sand with three bags of cement screed mix was spread out on the driveway, mixed together and lightly wetted while shovelling it into a heap.

When the screed was ready it was laid down in the area to be paved, compacted, cut level and then Leno began laying the paving blocks one by one, knocking them down level and up against each other with the rubber hammer.

By the end of Saturday we had the double garage section and one of the single garage sections completed. I worked on joining the two sections together around the little retainer wall.

I calculated we would still need another 30 square meters after that to finish paving the area we wanted paved around the garage block area!

As soon as we got to the farm we checked the paving that was grouted the previous weekend and got down to give the area in front of the double garage it's first scrubbing to get all the excess cement from the grouting process off the paving blocks. A bit of wire brush, a bit of nylon scrubbing brush and by evening it was looking really good.

We gave it a wash down and then decided that while we were washing off the paving we may as well give the entire double garage a good wash out as well.

When Verlyn and his dad arrived on Wednesday morning it was so nice to be able to have them work in a clean environment.

Our steel workers offloaded the prefabricated doors onto the garage floor and started setting up for the installation. Verlyn had already joined the two side folding doors together with their hinges and all he needed to do was bolt the side hinges into the walls and hang the doors onto them. Easier said than done as the facebrick work wasn't quite as straight as it should have been. But he had it all worked out and measured out everything so that all the doors would end up perfectly straight and level.

He first bolted the the top two hinges for the right hand door into the wall, positioned and welded the door onto them, and then set up the bottom hinge so that the first door hung straight and level.

Then he repeated the process for the left hand door and with a bit of fiddling and tweaking to get the two doors meeting together in the middle nicely, it was job done.

To finish off he welded the latches onto the bottoms of the outer doors and some lugs onto the inside of the centre doors where we could put a padlock. He will still need to put latches onto the center doors as well.

The hinge system was a little "industrial" but very strong and functional. Just perfect for the farm.

We also decided we weren't going to put any locking devices or handles on the outside of any of our doors - all locking and latching would be done from the inside only. Unfortunately that means we can only open the doors from the inside, but we have access to the garages from the house and the workshop, so it really shouldn't be a problem.

She tried scrubbing it wet this time (the previous afternoon we scrubbed it dry and suffered the cement dust around the dinner area and in our noses through the night). Scrubbing wet seemed to work well and the builders can finish the rest of the scrubbing on the weekend.

One of our business clients, Danny from Budget Window Coverings found a blind for us lying around in his workshop that a client had rejected and let us have it for free! Nothing wrong with it that I can see and the measurements were perfect, even though we made the window size completely non-standard (kind of to the nearest brick). Thanks, Danny.

The inside of the garden tool shed walls have now been painted with their second coat of paint and we just need to paint the floor before we can start fitting it out with it's workbenches, cupboards and shelves.

Next job is to cut, seal and fit about 150 knotty pine tongue and groove strips and that'll be the doors completed.

We've also decided to make our three single garage doors to the same style as the double garage door. The garages should look great once they're all fitted.

I took Banda, our suburban Friday gardener along to help offload them and while he was there he loaded all our bags garden refuse onto the new compost heap and covered it over with a layer of fresh horse manure. We were back home to catch up on some work before lunchtime.

Leno started off by completing the last section of the driveway in front of the garages. We then layed down another three rows of pavers along the entire length of the paved area. Reason for this was to be able to get the last rows perfectly straight and level as the rest of the driveway will just be concrete and will join neatly onto the last row of pavers.

We're planning to colour the concrete and give it a similar "oxide splash" effect that they used on the paving blocks. Stonecrete has kindly given me the colouring formula they use for their paving blocks.

The newly laid blocks were checked for alignment and the grout swept and pushed in between the pavers.

With paving completed for now, the building team moved on to digging up around the workshop area. Martie wet the grout later in the afternoon. We'll have to scrub it all clean on our next week's midweek stayover.

Lines were laid down so that the paving around the workshop will follow the same slope and meet up neatly with the driveway paving. We kept the digging area wet to reduce dust.

Whenever Martie or I had some spare time over the weekend we painted the panelling strips with sealer and on Sunday afternoon before we left I slotted them into the doors.

We still had to get the additional 500 blocks out so we loaded 250 on Wednesday afternoon when we drove out with their truck to Heidelberg. We helped their guys offload so that they would be back at the yard by closing time. We'll take the last 250 out on Saturday and that should allow us to finish all the paving on the weekend.

But just as one mystery is solved, another one takes it's place. Now we're trying to figure out what made the weird marks in the dust on the floor in the picture below?

With all the required materials at hand, Saturday morning we were able to get going early - the helpers started of by mixing a screed mix and after double checking all the measurements and levels, Leno began laying down paving blocks.

Once we were down to the bottom corner, I reviewed the levelling along the workshop wall and decided we could easily drop the level another 10cm lower, so the ground was cut away and restamped. The level was basically determined by the face brick and stock brick joint at ground level on the little curved retainer wall - we just didn't want any stock bricks showing above the paving. And the more we could cut away, the less fill material we would end up having to use for the concrete between the paving and first growing tunnel (next project). Dropping the level that 10cm It did make the little driveway up into the workshop a wee bit steeper, though.

to the little retainer wall. By the end of the day on Saturday we paved up to the retainer wall and started on the first row of pavers across the workshop entrance to get the starting level there correct. Cutting all those little pieces of

The two problems we dealt with continually on the entire paving project were firstly tightening and stretching the paving block spacing bit by bit to prevent having to cut any paving blocks and secondly, working with all the compound slopes. The ground slopes from both directions to the bottom corner of the workshop and we had to increase the slopes up to all the garage entrances.

With some really windy days over the past two weeks, when we arrived we decided to give the double garage and all the new paving a thorough wash-down. The water run-off onto the sand will also hopefully help dampen the dust a bit for the next few windy days predicted - another double cold front moving in again soon (our 5th of the season, I think).

We also managed to arrange two deliveries for sand, stone and cement from Jada's in case the weather will allow us to cast the concrete slab in front of the workshop on the weekend. A quick dinner and bath and we headed off to our monthly farm security meeting.

Over the previous two weeks I had collected all my "broken" belt sanding machines together and sent them in to their respective distributor workshops for repair. After a frustrating morning session sanding the garage doors I've decided that these power tools are just not worth repairing. After "repair" my little Black & Decker machine now doesn't even drive the belt (something intermittently slips inside) and the WoodStar unit I bought locally (I have to admit, it's worked fairly hard making the bathroom cabinets) was making a very rough sound and giving off electrical burning smells. After it's repair session with the distributor, it now doesn't smell any more but sounds even worse! I think it's time for a new belt sander.

It's slow going with the painting of the garage door panelling, but we're slowly filling the slots.

Despite the cold, the rain was very welcome to settle the dust - especially for the job planned for the weekend which involved a lot of digging close to the workshop (and now our living) area. But 11mm of rain was enough to turn the driveway dustbowl into mud for the weekend, and with the paving blocks not yet sealed it was a bit stressful trying to keep the builders (and dogs) off of it with their muddy feet.

Once they started laying and levelling the concrete across the wide area, it became obvious that casting another layer of concrete over that one and trying to get it level with a decent finish was just not going to work. The area was just too wide and even in the cold the concrete was setting too quickly, making levelling across the area very difficult.

Leno suggested we continue with the driveway edging three rows of paving blocks all the way to the end of the new concrete area to finish the edge of the concrete off nicely down there. A great idea and we had enough paving blocks left over to easily do that little strip. The team mixed a small batch of screed and he got going on the paving.

We had also decided that we would top the concrete with a coloured screed mix rather than a second layer of concrete, so we re-adjusted the colour mix formula and left out the agregate completely.

Late start, late finish. We only got about half way with six screed mixes and we had to set up some lights as the team were floating the surface well into the night. We decided to take Monday off work and have the team out for an extra day to get the job finished.

They assured me they had the colour formula all sorted out but I think they slipped up somewhere. Monday's work was a noticably lighter brown than the previous day's work. Could be that the thickness of the screed makes a difference to the colouring? We'll let it all dry out properly and then see.

They managed to finish the job working into the night again - a little shoddy and patchy in places.

All in all not the best concrete work but it will serve it's purpose to give us a surface outside the workshop area that we can easily wash down and reduce our dust problem.

Once the painting is all done the door is hung again and you have to hack into the wood in all directions with a big drill and a spade bit and a chisel to fit the handles and locks. I see some people take the door down again when they fit the locks but I fit everything with the door in it's place.

I suppose I'd just better get used to the door job - I've still got a lot of doors to fit before the house is finished.

Walking through the forest when it is wet is such a different experience. The twigs and leaves underfoot go all soft and there are no cracking and crunching sounds as you walk. The moss on the old bark of the tree trunks immediately turns green as soon as the moisture gets to it and the smells are indescribable.

Keeping warm during the cold spells isn't too much of a problem on the farm. We've always got a fire going (although outside and used mainly for cooking) and our workshop storeroom bedroom is very cosy - we just pile on more blankets and sometimes have to sleep with our jerseys on.

As soon as the sun is up over the hill in the mornings the temperature along the north facing forest line rises quickly and in no time we have to take off our jerseys.

It was a tight schedule to get the garage block secured by the end of July so that we could move out to the farm permanently from the beginning of August.

Our Johannesburg house will rented out and sub-let room by room as they were cleared. It's a complicated scheme but it's the only way we can think of where we will be able to move out to the farm with just our bare living essentials and without having to move all our furniture out there until the farm house is finished. A rough few months lie ahead.

Verlyn and his dad made a late start (partly our fault only getting out to the farm late) and quickly set up their equipment for the installation.

The doors were laid out on the garage floor and looked great. Verlyn worked methodically through the day to get them all lined up and working perfectly.

We stayed over Thursday night and spent most of the evening painting sealer onto the knotty pine panels. Early Friday morning we fitted the finished panels into the first door before the metalwork team arrived back to finish off the job.

Verlyn managed to get all the doors installed and just needed to come back some time during the next week to patch up the paintwork where he had welded the hinges and latches onto the frames.

And we nearly, nearly made it. Just got to hang another door or two, paint and fit the rest of the garage door panels, fit a few latches onto the windows and we'll be able to lock up the place. No more sleep-overs - we're real farm dwellers now.