Earlier this month Gordon’s Bay, and indeed most of the Cape Peninsula, was properly battered by powerful storm winds, which lasted for more that a couple of days and pretty much left a bad tasted in everyone’s mouth as we finally moved into Summer. Unfortunately for our little house here in Country Mews, she wasn’t able to walk out of this one completely unscathed, as first she lost one of her front roof barge boards, the wind ripping it completely down and shattering it into hundreds of little pieces (leaving me to watch the dancing roof tiles with a twitching eye, hoping that they would hold and not also come flying down – which thankfully they didn’t), followed by the unceremonious dumping of one of the back roof gutters as it too tumbled down and came to rest in our backyard flower bed.
The large side roof barge board was also pulled loose in the high winds, but luckily for us it managed to cling on for dear life and didn’t come tumbling down, a blessing because that one would have been a big one to repair! The second back gutter also got half pulled off from the roof, twisting completely around on itself and was left flapping in the wind, until the next storm winds followed, ripping that one down and smashing it against the shed, leaving a rather big crack in the one lip.
Now all of this damage should be covered by building insurance which is currently provided by ABSA, the same bank with which we have our home loan with. However, going through my records I discovered that ABSA conveniently doesn’t provide you with much information regarding your building insurance which you pretty much sign up for when you get your home loan, and more frustratingly, proved to be almost impossible to contact once all the storm winds had finally passed. Judging by the damage I could see all around me throughout Gordon’s Bay (seriously, fallen walls, destroyed carports, missing roof tiles) I can only assume they were flooded, but after a lengthy bout lasting a couple of days of trying to at least reach a human voice and put a claim in with them, I eventually threw in the towel and brought in one of the other inhabitants of Country Mews, a handyman named Danny who also happens to have his kid in the same creche that Jessica goes to.
As it turned out, Danny is quite fond of weather like this because based on the number of houses which he was already in charge of fixing here in Country Mews alone, this makes for a great little year-end bonus for the profession.
Anyway, after a couple of false starts, Danny eventually came up with a quote of just short of a R1,000 to repair all the damage, and early one morning he and one of his guys pitched up in their little truck and after an hour or two of happily banging away, I smiled, shook hands and paid via EFT, happy in the knowledge that my little house was once again up and running at full strength, and this time hopefully a little more prepared for the next bout of storm winds we’ll undoubtedly face here in sunny but windy Gordon’s Bay!
