Tools for the job

There are two kinds of DIYer – the perfectionist and the bodger. There’s no middle ground – by definition if something is not done perfectly it is done imperfectly and an imperfect job can only ever be a bodge. That’s not to say that there aren’t degrees of bodgery. It’s a dark art that has many forms, from the slapdash to the ingenious. I’m sure by now you can guess that I am not a perfectionist.

My stepfather Dave and my father-in-law Mike are. They properly research the job at hand, select the correct tools for the job and then go about their work with meticulous detail. The advantage of this approach is that you get exactly what you are after, and you know that it’ll work. The disadvantages to this approach are that a) it tends to take time (ask Dave what time it is and he’ll explain how to build a watch) and b) it is usually impossible in Montenegro for logistical, material and temporal reasons. Mike recoiled in horror one time when I was securing a fitting of pipe with a pair of pliers rather than a plumbers’ wrench, but the reality was that I would have had to drive 30km to buy one, and this was time I didn’t have. In Montenegro, you’ll be forced into bodgery because you can’t find what you need (KIPS and OKOV between them deserve –and have received – blog posts of their own detailing their inadequacies), the correct tool might not exist (good luck finding a pull-saw in Montenegro) and you might only have a limited amount of time to solve your problem.

This is how I have wound up cleaning our mouldy Skoda’s interior with a child’s toothbrush (nothing else would get into those hard to reach places), nailing together plastic sheeting and pallets from a rubbish tip to make a waterproof woodshed, using a dustpan and brush to clean and bail out our hot tub of dirt and rainwater and rigging up a plastic barrel with a hose, tap and spray gun so that guests can shower off before using the tub – none of these obvious, or optimum, solutions to the problems at hand. Oh, and I’ve finally succeeded in pumping water from the spring at the bottom of our garden into our reservoir at the top.

This last item is actually worthy of further explanation.

Our villa is not connected to the mains, for reasons to dull to go into at length (search May 2009 or so if you really want details) so we rely on water being pumped from our reservoir, underneath the car parking, via what is known here as a hidrofor. A hidrofor is a pump that uses bladder pressure to supply the whole house with equally pressured water – ie, there ought to be no drop in pressure of all four showers are used at once, say. Hidrofors are simple things with very few moving parts, the idea being that they should be next to maintenance free once installed. Naturally ours went wrong continually last year until we finally found a reliable electrician to sort it out (thanks, Novo). As for the reservoir itself – well, the problem is that it’s not big enough. It’s not big enough because back in 2008 our first builder, Bolimir the Bad – definitely a bodger – talked me out of putting the reservoir underneath the terrace for “structural reasons” that unsurprisingly turned out to be a load of old bollocks. Instead of a 70,000 litre tank that easily captured our rainwater from the drainpipes, then, we wound up with a 16,000 litre tank 30 metres away that had no rain capture and no other feed either. Thanks, Bolimir, curse your voluminous arse.

After one summer of getting our reservoir continually filled up by truck, we decided that things had to change once and for all, so when Mike was here last October I decided to make use of his degree in engineering to brainstorm a solution which – to his dismay and my glee – turned out to be the most sublime of bodges. First, I rigged up a rain-recycling system that would take rainwater in winter and deposit it in our undersized tank. It worked a treat. Bravo, me! The problem was what do in summer, when the tank ran dry.

Down at the bottom of our garden is a natural spring. Present on this site for several hundred years, it gushes natural mineral water right up until about mid-October, when it too has to wait for the rains again. It was one of the main reasons we bought the house in the first place. The difficulties were twofold if we wanted to use it to fill up our reservoir. First of all, we had to pump the water 35m back up the hill, which required a pretty strong pump. Secondly, the trough into which the water emptied held only about 200 litres, and a pretty strong pump would empty it in about a minute and a half, faster than it would fill up again in summer. Oh, and the trough was full of holes.

The bodge Mike and I came up with was this: situate a strong pump right next to the spring, and attach the feed not to the trough, but to the tap (which had a flow rate of at least 20l/min) to ensure continuous flow. We would then force the highly pressurised water up the hill via a series of valves that would be half closed, thus forcing the water to travel more slowly and ensure that it would reach the reservoir, but do so slowly enough to never leave the pump “breathing” air (which would knacker it).*

We could then manually top up our tank overnight, say, in the height of summer. It was a theoretically perfect solution to a problem that no-one had ever bothered or needed to solve before. My speciality!

 

And yes, that is a dog kennel the pump’s living in.  

Back in mid-October I spent a week crawling through brambles laying pipe and cable and literally 30 seconds after completing the work, the ****ing spring ran dry. At that stage I broke the world record for continuous inventive swearing, breaking the old record also held by me.

So that’s the science bit. And the reason I’ve bored you so about it? Well, we hooked it up again this week now that the spring is in full flow, and it only ****ing works!! The bodger’s bodger, son of a bodger and in all likelihood himself father to a future bodger, had put something together that actually worked!

And I just thought I should tell the world about it, that’s all. Well, the half a dozen people reading this, anyway.

The rest of my time has been taken up with – after pointlessly complicated DIY – my favourite activity in the world: dealing with Montenegrin bureaucracy. Imagine the stupidest system, run by the stupidest government, adhering to the stupidest set of rules ever devised by King Stupid the 28^th of Stupidville (apologies Richard Curtis), and you’re getting close to describing the experience of dealing with Montenegrin paperwork.

This is how you get a “zdravstvena knjizica”, or to non-Srpski speakers, the little green book that entitles you to free healthcare through the contributions you pay employing yourself through your own company.

-           Get your residency permit, work permit, passport and company contract - and several b/w copies of each - and go to Schalter 6 at Bar Opstina to get your little grey work permit book stamped at 11am sharp when they open.
-           Hand over your documents. You get a pink slip with €2 of tax to pay. -           Head back out of the opstina to the post office, the only place where you can pay this €2 tax. Queue for 30 minutes. Fill out another form, hand over €2 and your pink slip. You get a yellow slip.
-          Take this yellow slip back to Schalter 6. Wait another 20 minutes after rejoining the queue, and trade it for your little grey work permit book.
-          Go to Schalter 9 and hand it over with all the other documents. Wait 20 minutes.
-          Head back out of the opstina over the road to a nearby copy-shop to photocopy your passport again, because they need another copy.
-          Rejoin the queue for Schalter 9 and hand over your documents again.
-          Head back out of the Opstina because they need a different kind of work contract that you didn’t know about.
-          Find a “knjizara”, buy a 10 cent copy of the standard worker contract. Fill it out. Badly.
-          Rejoin the queue at Schalter 9. Have the fed up lady at Schalter 9 fill it out for you. This will endear you to her even more.
-          Receive a two page document that needs an official opstina stamp on it.
-          Leave the building a third time to find office 215, which is where you get the stamp for this new document. Stamping this document is not the lady at Schalter 9’s job. Queue outside the door, get the stamp.
-          Return to Schalter 9 with the stamp to get the pink slip to pay your €5 tax.
-          The woman working at Schalter 9 tells you that if you want to get your wife and child registered through your employment she will need proof of ID for them. You proffer their passports and are told that these won’t be sufficient. You explain that 200 nations around the globe say different, and ask why Montenegro does not consider a passport proof of ID.
-          Try really hard not to swear/scream/tear the opstina down with your bare hands when you are told that you need to submit a copy of your marriage certificate and child’s birth certificate. Which you don’t have with you.
-          Explain that both of these English documents have the following phrase in capitals all over them – “THIS CERTIFICATE IS NOT PROOF OF IDENTITY”.
-          See above entry but one.
-          Somehow avoid total meltdown when the lady informs you that as it is now 1pm, the Schalter is shut until tomorrow.

-          Return to Schalter 9 at 11am the next day to get your pink slip. Hand over copies of aforementioned certificates.

-          Head back out of the opstina to the post office, the only place where you can pay this €5 tax. Queue for 30 minutes. Fill out another form, hand over €5 and your pink slip. You get a yellow slip.
-          Take this yellow slip back to Schalter 9. Wait another 20 minutes after rejoining the queue, and trade it for your 2 page document again.
-          Now head off to the Fond Zdravstveno in the centre of Bar. Hand over your document and tell the lady you’d like your little green books stamped, please.
-          Club the bitch to death when she tells you that you can come back in 2 days to collect them because she has a “pauza” now and then the office shuts for the day.
-          Not really. An eye roll or two usually suffices at this stage.
-          Come back two days later to collect your little green books.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here



Now, you could sit a dimmer-than-average rhesus monkey down at a desk, keep it tripped out on tamazapam and ask it to type up a set of legal documents in whatever language it felt appropriate and you would still not come up with a system as bafflingly idiotic as that which every resident of Montenegro has to go through every time they want anything with an official stamp on it. There are ancient carved stones that have been kept in 3000yr old amphoras that make more sense than this. Even Lost makes more sense than this. And in May I have to go back and get our visas renewed. Pray for me.

Next time: we move house again and get our hot tub working (we hope)!

*those of you muttering “what about self-priming pumps?” ought to know that such a thing is – unbelievably – not available anywhere in Montenegro.