On the tiles with great and good in Transylvania
THE good news was that Doug, the American engineer in charge of construction, announced at breakfast that yesterday had been the best first day ever on a Habitat build.
The bad news was that several of the blokes had been forgetting to lock the door when they went to the toilet, resulting in some very surprised gals.
"Oh, and we'll have a film crew following you for the rest of the week to make a documentary," said Jenny Williams, Habitat's fundraising genius.
"Which means if you're on DHSS, look away," said Peter Farquharson, the organisation's director.
On site, the electricians had wired up the houses overnight, and it was time to plaster the outside walls and start putting the roof battens on ready for tiles.
Below the joiners as they worked on the roof of the house next door, Dorina Balasz was busy sweeping up the sawdust; house proud even before she had a house.
Lucky she and the Sandra family weren't concentrating on our building skills, which this morning owed more to enthusiasm than skill.
"Here, do you think this house will still be up by Christmas?" said Stephen.
"Not if we have anything to do with it," said Mark as we looked disconsolately at House 4a across the street, where the Duggan Team, which seem to be composed mostly of professional joiners, had already finished the roof battens, whereas we hadn't even started.
Even worse, our next task was packing fibreglass insulation into the internal walls, a dusty, messy job, even if by the time we'd finished, the house was better insulated than any of ours back home.
Marcela and Dorina looked on happily, knowing that they had a cosy Christmas ahead of them. If the house stayed up that long.
"I've just had a brilliant idea," said Mark. "Why don't we offer to do the insulation for 4a, if they send their joiners over to do our roof?
"Mark, that's a brilliant idea," said everyone in unison, even if it did mean more insulating work for us.
An hour later, we emerged covered in fibreglass dust and almost certain to die of terminal Insulators' Lung, to find that we had been the victims of an Irish exchange scheme. We had gone over to them, but they hadn't come back to us, and were now busy putting on their roof tiles.
"Right, that settles it. We're burning their house down tonight, and they can start again tomorrow morning," said Seamus as Ian Paisley appeared down from the roof carrying a claw hammer and a small wooden cross.
"Any religious significance in the cross, Ian?" I said, thinking that if he'd just had a St Paul on the road to Damascus-style conversion and gone over to the other side, it would be a great story, if a bit of a shock to his dad.
"Nah. We're in Transylvania, and you can't be too careful," he said.
At this stage he had to head home to deal with something called Ulster politics. He tried to explain it to us before we left, but no one could make head or tail of it.
He was replaced on the roof by the Rev Dr John Dunlop, giving us the remarkable sight of the former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church up there hammering nails into roof battens.
Honestly, those Moderators. If they can't get close to heaven one way, they'll always find another.
Below him, the outside walls were already being plastered and the windows were going in; double-glazed units so snazzy that I made a mental note to smuggle a few of them home in hand baggage, since they were far better than the ones in my house.
Half-an-hour later, we were just getting ready to burn House 4a to the ground when the joiners, who had obviously got wind of our evil plans, came rushing over en masse and clambered onto our roof.
Several wheelbarrows, a chain gang and a commandeered truck later, we had transferred hundreds of terracotta tiles from the central store to our roof.
They were, I noticed as Kim and I unloaded them from the truck, Double Roman design, so it was probably a good thing that Ian Paisley had gone home, since he could never have handled them.
In any case, he had been replaced by the SDLP's Declan O'Loan, who had been working so hard all day that it could only be a matter of time before he came down with a bad dose of Protestant work ethic.
At the end of a hard day, we stood back and gazed around us in wonder at the remarkable sight of 10 houses with walls plastered and windows and roofs in place.
Sadly, none of them included the ancient Transylvanian tradition of the wolf tile, set in such a way that it howled as a warning when the cold wind blew from the north, bringing the wolves down from the mountains.
All the same, it had been an astonishing day's progress, and we headed home for a shower with dust in our throats, sweat on our brows and a quiet satisfaction in our hearts, sure in the knowledge that the first beer of the evening would taste like manna from heaven.
It was a feeling that lasted all through dinner and even survived arriving back at the hotel later a full 15 minutes before its official closing time of 11pm.
Only to see the receptionist lock the door and turn off the lights the moment she saw us coming.
Making a second mental note of the day, this time to tell the Transylvanian tourist board that they needed to move on from the Dracula school of welcome, I fell into bed and was asleep as my head hit the pillow, just before it met my thoughts coming the other way.
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Tuesday 14 February 2012
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Temperature: 6 C to 8 C
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