30 1991 – 1996: Jessop’s Studio CC, Picture Framers

30 <> 1991 – 1996: Jessop’s Studio CC, Picture Framers

Paarden Eiland. however, was not the right place for a framing workshop. Business was slow and the rent was killing us. It was then that  DorothyAnne came up with the idea to look in a country town for a house with one of those outbuildings common in rural areas where we could have our workshop at home and save on the rent! We selected the town of Robertson as a likely place to look and drove out on a Sunday to view any likely houses with outbuildings that might be on show. The first one we looked at had the necessary accommodation so I asked the owner to give us a week’s option on it, which he did. Not far beyond Robertson is the Little Karoo town of Montagu, and living there was a doll-maker, one or two of whose dolls  DorothyAnne had bought in Cape Town, so we decided to go through there to meet her.

As we drove around Montagu that day we saw several properties with ‘For Sale’ signs but the Agents were not open, this being Sunday in a country town. We liked the look of the town so we noted the name and phone number of Agents from “For Sale” signs attached to two or three of the houses and determined to return during the week, which we did the very next Friday. An Agent, Ron, showed us two or three houses and we chose one with an historic look about it. It didn’t have an outbuilding but we liked it enough to sign an Offer To Purchase subject to the sale of our house in Wynberg. (That in hindsight was a mistake — we should rather have let the house and had it to come back to one day — but we didn’t know we would want to come back!).

Our house in Wynberg was bought almost immediately by the next-door neighbour, who actually was the Agent through whom we had bought it in the first place! That sale was a very good deal for us as we received for the house more than double what we had paid for it. That gave us quite enough to pay for the Montagu house (and even leave enough over for us later to buy a caravan and a bakkie to tow it!)

The old KWV wine cellar in Montagu was no longer in use by then but several rooms at one end, presumably their former offices and workshops, were leased out to other businesses. We negotiated the last available space there for a very reasonable rental but the ‘space’ had a large opening which we had to have fitted with a window and door at our own expense. It resulted in a very nice workshop, away from the street but that suited us well enough and it wasn’t long before customers found their way to us.

Before the premises in Montagu were ready for us to move our equipment in, we still had the shop in Paarden Eiland to run for a month, something which I did by traveling to Cape Town on Monday morning and back to Montagu on Friday afternoon for the weekend. For accommodation in Cape Town during that time, Jenny let me stay in her house in Wynberg while she was away on business for a week, and for another period Timothy let me use his room in the flat he shared with Suzanne in Mowbray while he was working in Hermanus. For the rest of the time I camped in the shop in Paarden Eiland, sleeping on the large workbench we used for framing! Sleeping on the workbench wasn’t too bad, but it was a bit weird being in Paarden Eiland which is otherwise completely deserted at night.

As soon as the workshop in Montagu was ready, Jenny and Timothy helped us one weekend to move all the equipment, Jenny with her car, and Tim and I in the bakkie towing a trailer lent to us by a friend, Dave. The shop in Paarden Eiland was then empty and the landlord agreed to find another tenant for it but we had to pay the rent until that happened. Fortunately it wasn’t too long before we were released from our contract. We could then start making the framing business produce some return on our investment. It never was a highly profitable business but it did pay for all the bakkie expenses and eventually we were able to pay  DorothyAnne on a commission-basis for the pictures she framed. All in all it was quite a pleasant time for us in business together except that the shop was unpleasantly hot in summer.

The house in Montagu — which we named “Erin Cottage” in recognition of the Irish blood in  DorothyAnne’s veins — was very interesting. It was built of sun-dried mud bricks over a hundred years before but had been extended at different times by the addition a bathroom and a further bedroom. The roof structure in the oldest part of the house was of undressed saplings, dried out and with bark still clinging to sections. It looked so flimsy that one would have expected the corrugated iron roof to collapse at any time! However, it was amazingly firm and I had no qualms about climbing onto the roof to scrape it down and paint it. The major problem with the rising damp in the house was in the dining room and in the ‘afdak’ (lean-to)bathroom. The pavement on the upper side of the house had been built up over the years completely disrupting the drainage around the foundations. In addition to paint bubbling off the wall in the dining room, we encountered the greatest problem when redoing the bathroom where we wanted to mount a shelf on the wall to hold a washbasin and found what was virtually mud when drilling holes for the bolts!