Preparing for New Neighbours
May was super busy for us because we spent a lot of our free time, and some work time, making improvements to the house & garden next door before our new neighbours were due to arrive at the end of the month. We had 3 separate maintenance teams come to make improvements doing everything from sanding and painting the veranda to installing a new solar power system on the roof, and also including a lot of small, yet important touches, like sanding & varnishing furniture and re-grouting the shower.
We even had a wonderful friend ditch her husband for a weekend to come to Tele and help Shiv get all the kitchen utensils and bedding sorted and the cupboards cleaned. We also employed a lot of local friends to come to dig drainage ditches, cut the grass where the lawn mower couldn’t reach and haul gravel & stones from the stream so the maintenance team could make a cement path. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it to bring the house up to standard and help our new neighbours to start feeling like Telefomin could be their home.
We are so grateful to be supported by a hardworking team of maintenance folks and friends who were willing to come and stay in Telefomin to help us get the house up to standard before our new neighbours arrived. We couldn’t have done it in the short time-frame without their hard work!
Dave, our Maintenance Manager, and his wife Caroline, taking a well-earned break in between all their work. Caroline was sanding, painting and cleaning whilst Dave was installing the solar power system, amongst other things.
Alan & Annette sanded and varnished some of the furniture and re-grouted the shower.
Ryan put up a new fence along the back and dropped some of the fencing around the garden to try and keep the local dogs out as they have a bad habbit of leaving unwanted “presents” behind!
Our “brother”, Lukas came and re-dug all the drainage ditches. Telefomin is very wet, so drainage ditches are essential to help prevent grass becoming bog.
Mandy hopped on a plane and joined us for the weekend, leaving her hard-working husband behind. We spent all of Friday afternoon and Saturday tidying out the kitchen utensils, bedding, towels, etc and making sure we had everything the new family would need when they first arrived. Then we enjoyed ourselves with games on Sunday afternoon!
These strong, hard-working ladies filled bags of gravel out of the stream then heaved them on to the truck, all with nothing but shovels and their bare hands!
Daniel sanded and painted the whole veranda, all of the window frames and some of the outside of the house - it looks so bright and fresh now!
We sold some of the old furniture to local friends and the maintenance guys kindly helped us deliver it. This is the house of Lucy, our Base Manager, she will be building a new house for herself soon so she was thrilled to get a new couch, without having to pay for a charter to fly it in to Telefomin.
The house next door - Telefomin House 2, which now has a family enjoying it again!
Our “sisters” Joyce & Vero helped the Maintenance Manager move some batteries from House 2 into the house of one of our Traffic Officers, Steve, and he fixed Steve’s solar too. Don’t be fooled, these are very strong ladies, each battery weighs approx. 60kg!
Glen came out to help with the house but also took a few days to give our trusty truck the first Service in years! He discovered a few problems, but thankfully he was able to fix most of them.
Storing the gravel outside house 2 before the maintenance team needed it. We had some friends who were scrubbing the outside of the house before it got painted, they helped to off-load the gravel from the truck.
