Simon set up his camp in our garden and ensconced himself in his tent, together with a fridge, solar charger and a bed. I occupied our little cottage ready for an extended stay.
The first objective was to rig four cranes on each corner of the cabin, as close as possible to the corner concrete pillars. We had already dug the holes down to the foundations of the four corner pillars. We then felled four biggish trees, about 8m in length. Before planting them in the holes with the help of Bessie, we fastened an industrial quality, 2-ton capacity chain block to the top of each tree/crane. Each chain block had a hoisting length of 6 metres. The hoisting and planting of each crane required some basic rigging, knotting, geometry and physics skills. To assist us in hoisting the cranes into a vertical position, we dragged the base of each crane as close to one of the holes as possible. We then constructed a basic A-frame structure out of two smaller trees. Then we tied the crane to Bessie with the rope going over the apex of the A-frame. As the crane was pulled into a vertical position the base slid into the hole and Bobby-is-your-uncle. In order to keep the crane steady in the process, we rigged three guy ropes to the top of the crane, each held by Dumisani, Siya and me, going off at angles of approximately 90 - 120 degrees to each other, while Simon pulled the crane with Bessie. Once the crane was vertical, we tied off these guy ropes to provisional iron stakes which we had driven into the ground at strategic positions. This process we repeated four times. Once the four cranes were up, we tidied up the guy ropes of each crane by fastening two of them to the base of the two adjacent cranes, and the third going off at 45 degrees to a convenient tree or tree stump nearby.
We were ready for hoisting our first log onto the pillars. Our neighbour commented that the building site looked like a trapeze setup at a circus.