Boeries, bangers and snags; sangas, sarnies and sarmies; building malarkey background; turfed from the nest; Cyclone Seroja and quo vadis?

Here we are, celebrating the breaking of ground this week at 543 Burns Beach Road, Iluka!

Surrounded by the family – son Carl, Carrie, Mia and Holly; daughter Blaire, Colin and Sam – we broke ground today, Sunday the 17^th of April 2021. Son Carl brought the spade, son-in-law Colin furnished the Weber BabyQ, and we supplied the snags* and the mimosas. Only Daughter #1 was missing, sadly – cheers, Wendy!

Boerewors, bangers and snags

*It’s hard to discover exactly why Aussies call sausages “snags” – apart from their passion for slang. Apparently, the term is a fairly recent introduction that dates back only to the 1980s. Whatever. Snags on the barbie are the way to go.

Do any fellow-Durbanites thrill to the nostalgia of Saturday morning boerewors rolls, hot off the braai outside Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket by the Sea? Julie S. does. Sally C. remembers them, but snobbily denies ever having partaken in their delights. Roy has no memory of this culinary landmark; but that may be because he used to live so far west of Tollgate before he met me.

Anyway, it warmed my heart’s cockles to discover that local DIY hardware mecca Bunnings Warehouse continues the tradition. Bunnings is a chain of massive stores selling anything from potting medium and fake grass to power tools, paint, plumbing and electrical supplies. (Depending on your proclivities, it’s either Beloved Bunnings or Boring Bunnings. Roy can spend hours trawling its endless aisles. After 10 minutes, I’m yawning to the point of swallowing my own head.)

Bunnings’ weekend sausage sizzle is a community and fundraising endeavour that, from one account, sees the scoffing of some 40,000 snags a year at some 290 Bunnings outlets countrywide.

Boerie, bangers or snags?

What in South Africa you’d call a boerie roll, and in the UK a banger butty, is here a snag sanga. (Sanga owes its etymological origin to sang(d)wich.) To pursue this theme, Aussies adore a Vegemite sanga or sandwich; Brits favour a Bovril “sarnie”, while many South Africans prefer their “sarmies” with Marmite.

For us low-carb types, however, it’s a lonely sausage/snag/banger/wors on the end of a fork. We’ll take our Sunday carb treat in the form of mimosas, thank you. (And tomorrow it’s back to gym and keto.)

Speaking of cultural diversity, this particular block of Burns Beach Road has a preponderance of Brits and South Africans, as we discovered when our friendly new neighbours-to-be popped by to say hello. Jackie (on our northern boundary), and Werner, who’s her neighbour to the north, are both South Africans. Immediately to the south are Welshman Graham and his wife Caroline, and t’other side of them are Yvonne and Mark (a Geordie and a Yorkshireman respectively).

So, far, so good – and lots of lovely people to invite to our eventual housewarming!

Background – where this building malarkey all started

It’s been over two years since we bought this beachfront plot in March 2019 – and it will be another year or more before we move in. Preparatory site works start this coming week, and the slab should go down next week. A double-storey house takes a full year to build, and so our new home should be ready in April or May 2022.

We haven’t exactly been evicted from 54 Daytona Drive – it’s more that it’s time to move on to a new chapter. It was agreed from the start that Carl and Carrie could buy us out of our share of the house any time they wanted to, and now it looked like they could afford to start thinking about it.

Mind you, my own mother turfed me out of the nest during my second year at varsity. Her reasoning – “If you can’t live by our rules, then you can’t live under our roof” – though entirely unoriginal, was doubtless spoken from the heart.

(Her motive, she said later, had been to force me to dump the unsuitable boyfriend, but her plan backfired. He had a job, and my study bursary and waitressing job made me somewhat independent. We shacked up together – as we called it 1979 – and lived more-or-less unhappily ever after for the best part of a decade.)

Rather pathetically, I started humming Paul Simon’s “Homeless”, as we scoured our brains for options. One possibility was to buy in an upcoming development on Scarborough Beach, but it was over-priced for its small size, and too far away from the family.

The Big Set-up

Another surprisingly affordable option – considerably more affordable than what we’ve now let ourselves in for – was to buy a ready-built house on one of the smaller cottage plots in Iluka/Burns Beach. We saw a couple of them that happened to be on the market, and I thought were perfectly fine. But Roy didn’t fancy them, surprise, surprise!

In retrospect, I can see that he was setting me up. He’d been hankering after “a big house” for years, and this might be his last opportunity.

Then we looked at a series of showhouses – “just to see what sort of thing was being built”, both here in Iluka and in Catalina, a new development just a few kilometres up the coast.

Morgan, who at that time represented Ben Trager Homes, mentioned a vacant plot for sale at 543 Burns Beach Road. It looked straight at the dunes. It was 300 metres from Burns Beach itself. It was 500 metres down the road from Carl and Carrie’s, and 2km from Blaire and Colin’s house. It was perfect.

Almost before we knew it, we’d become the  proud owners of a plot and prospective builders of our own house. This was never something I thought I’d ever do. Neither Roy nor I had built a house before – but it suddenly felt like the right way to go.

Firstly, like Roy, I’d started to hanker after the idea of lots of my own space, under my own roof. Secondly, as foreigners we wouldn’t have been able to buy a second-hand home in our own names. Thirdly, my man always needs a project, and this one would keep him busy for years.

After we’d agreed together on a basic design for an upside-down two-storey house, and settled on Collier Homes as our builder – Roy went on to spend countless hours tweaking and re-tweaking the plans, down to the minutest of details.  And now, with the necessary contractual agreements all signed and sealed, and building permits under our belts, we’re finally on the starting blocks.

One has to feel sorry for the builders, though. With us living just 500 metres up the road, Roy is going to be down there bothering them every day.

Cyclone Seroja – and where to next?

If not for Cyclone Seroja, which hammered WA’s Mid-West, we would have been heading northwards this Friday for a road trip to Kalbarri, Monkey Mia and Shark Bay. Sadly, Kalbarri has been 70-percent flattened by the storm; and with the rest of the region reeling in the aftermath, Roy easily convinced me to to cancel our trip.  (He was suspiciously quick to insist that we should not go.  And our not going does mean we’ll be here to witness the pouring of the slab next week.)

If the new Singapore and/or New Zealand travel bubble allows it, I’ll try to prise him away from Perth, if only to give the poor builders a break.