So, Tuesday came, and went. It was the big day – the day the container got delivered to our land.

It was a cold, windy and wet day. Not the ideal day to be out in the weather, let alone trying to move five zillion kilo metal container from one place to another. But I’d been pressured by the person I bought it from to get it out of the lot, cause the owners of the lot were pressuring him to get it out cause they needed the space. Always remembering that I bought it and promptly went to Athens for a week, which meant I’d already put off having it delivered by a week.

During that time I’d also had to organise where the container would go, how it would be oriented, and organise the ground to be levelled and have gravel put down.

All that was finally finished on Monday last week, so Tuesday was the big day. Despite the fact that when the diggy-diggy man called me to tell me the ground was finally ready, he said he wasn’t sure the truck (with a crane on the back, henceforth referred to as the lifty-lifty man) could get onto the land without getting bogged.

I got the diggy-diggy man and the lifty-lifty man to talk to eachother and it was decided that it was ok to deliver on Tuesday… all systems are go.

It was hard work getting the container off its trailer and onto the truck. I’m sure the only reason swearing wasn’t involved was that I was there, watching the whole thing. Turns out the crane just wasn’t big or strong enough to lift my container. The lifty-lifty man said it was much heavier than most ‘normal’ containers. Yeah. Its 7.5m long, a bit wider and much taller than most. So, it IS heavier.

He’d visited the land to see if he could get in, after seeing the container, didn’t he wonder if the crane he’d brought would do the job?

I don’t know. I’m no expert. I’m just a woman…

After a slow and harrowing trip down the narrow slippery roads, we made it to the land. Turns out the gravel was not the kind of gravel in envisaged. In Australia when you say gravel you usually mean some kind of hard, very separate stones you can choose the size of. And in most cases we tend to use ‘blue metal’ – like this:

This stuff doesn’t hold water, its great for things like ditches and drains. I would have thought it would be the perfect base for a container. Nothing will grow in it, ensuring the container didn’t end up with a forest underneath, a haven for snakes, while keeping it as dry as possible in the wet.

Instead, I got this very dirty/muddy/soily crushed stone which will probably compact nicely, but… well, its not what I thought I was getting. My fault. I didn’t go see what my options were. I trusted in the fact that the diggy-diggy man knew what would be best for my purpose.

Whatever.

But the screw-ups don’t end there my friends. Take a look at the photo above and take note that the levelled, gravelled area is on this side of the truck.

When we got there and faced the area that had been prepared, I explained how I wanted the container to sit: I wanted it to sit about 1.5-2m from the bushy stuff you can see on the right of the photo, parallel to it, so that the side door would face this way, to the west, and the front doors would face north, towards the eventual studio.

So when he pulled up at a 90 degree angle to the spot I was concerned, but as always, being a woman*, I thought ‘he’s the expert here, he knows his machinery, he knows what he’s doing, I shouldn’t question him’.

I will never learn that I have to, I MUST question. Cause my opinion matters. I’m not stupid, I have a brain. Maybe if I’d said ‘hey, why not pull up alongside the spot I want it and just pick it up and plonk it down’, maybe he’d have taken my advice. Maybe not. Maybe he’d have said, ‘no, this is the best way.’ Or ‘No, its too soft there, I’ll get bogged.

Whatever. The result was this…

They began lifting the container up off the bed of the truck and it was scraping and complaining and the crane was cursing their mothers.

I can only presume that the plan had been to lift the container off the truck, then swing the crave over to the side and, with a bit of pushing and shoving, spin it around to sit at a 90 degree angle from the truck.

Don’t ask me how that was supposed to work, but I do believe that’s what they expected to happen.

But no matter how much they pushed and shoved, the container would not spin enough, it wouldn’t clear the ‘legs’ of the truck, and the crane couldn’t lift it any higher.

This was the result. The container is now sitting at a more or less 90 degree angle from where I wanted it. Nowhere near the gravelled area. Not on a levelled surface.

Its now sitting on a light downward slope with a slight angle to the right. They said ‘It’ll be fine. You must know a man with a jack, just get him to lift one corner at a time and put besser blocks under the corners to level it.’

Instead of looking out from my future studio to the front doors of the container (the narrow side) I will be looking at a big flat side.

And I paid for the levelling of the ground and the gravel!

And the back, where I planned to put an outhouse, which I wanted facing towards the hill, where its much more private and out of site of the building area, is now visible.

So I’m in a funk. I got back from what was supposed to be a very exciting day for me and fell into one of my ‘can’t do a thing’ moods. It was just wrong. I’d thought about the orientation a lot before deciding where it should go. I’d considered where the sun would rise and where it would set, where I’d put a grooming table and a bath for dogs, where I’d put a workbench, where I’d put a sail for shade, where I’d put a garden to be watered by my shower and the dog bath.

Suddenly it was all messed up.

Ok, so maybe this orientation will work… I don’t know. I have to think about it. maybe I can put a garden between the studio and the big flat side to sort of hide it. I will still have some morning shade on the other side and some afternoon shade on this side, but not where I pictured it. Maybe the front doors are better not straight into the north wind. I don’t know. I’m confused now.

I spoke to my engineer and he said he will come and we will look and evaluate the situation. If it needs fixing we will fix it. We’ll find a way.

But the gravel I paid for is now over there, instead of under the container.

sigh.

Stay tuned for the next installment or disaster. Whichever comes first.

z

• So many times in my life I’ve let men decide things for me, tell me how things should be done, walk all over me. I am so capable of making decisions and thinking outside the box, and seeing things clearly and even for thinking of better or easier ways of doing things. Yet I persist in letting them push me around. Why?