This took a dozen days, whenever we had the time. We decided to close off the basement and the yard, as much as possible. What gate we have is just old junk planks clapped on, it's fair to say that we don't have a gate. The garage is wide open front and back, and the basement has holes for door and windows.
So we wanted to at least make a gate and close the basement. The garage is more of an eave than a room, it's there to keep the basement dry.
And it was some miracle that we made it. I cut the iron with hand saw, we alternated at the welder, and I had a grinder to smooth the welds. Didn't know there were also cutting disks for the grinder, didn't learn that, hence the handsaw. At least I had a proper bench with a real majstor's vise.
For basement windows the hinges were hard to invent, but did think of something, and even did it just as I meant to, and it worked. The hinges were on the upper edge, so keeping the window open needed no special mechanism - just prop it with a piece of wood. And it opened and closed smoothly.
For fillings on the gate and basement door we took the so-called ship floor, i.e. thin planks with feather and groove. We welded a flah (flat band of metal) on one side, and a thinner el profile would hold them on the other side. However, that required screws every 40cm, and all my drill bits were dull. Didn't know how to sharpen them, and in my mind buying bits whenever needed was still considered a luxury, so even if I thought about it, I immediately perished the thought, censored it out. So the drilling took a long, long time...
The end result was a basement that could be locked, practically impenetrable unless one breaks the glass or cuts the metal. The gate was done too, it's just that we didn't get the hinges right - guess we hung the short pane but not the long one - for one, our welder didn't quite reach the temperature required to weld a half inch bar to a 100x100mm box. Probably required some tricks of the trade. My welding education mostly consisted of peeking into the textbooks, wherever the students would leave them open, I didn't even leaf through them nor read the text, just gazed at the drawings. Toza and his other pal from the vineyard fixed this later, and even that they had tough luck with, got it right on third try.
Around this time we had a minor stereo war, because Faik's older son put out the speakers on the upstairs terrace and played songs for the asking of radio Teheran, or some such muslim turbo narodnjaci. Which was okay when they celebrated, like when the sunet (circumcision) was performed on the sons, or when one of the daughters was getting married - he'd put up a big tent, in the latter case on for the whole weekend, expanding in front of our house, his, and one more, couldn't pass the street. But this was a workday, afternoon, we couldn't survive, our choice was swelter in silence, or fresh breeze and mindfuck noise through the open windows.
To that Go composed some eight minutes of noise from the Rise of the Triad, the Dos game of the time, which we played a lot while in Hungary, with rotating blades and plane three dee in two or three planes, so it had stairs, lifts and jumps. It had explosions, screams, snarls, clang of blades, shooting and whatnot. Three minutes sufficed.
We did not have to repeat this.
23-V-2023 - 27-VI-2024