Our New Farmhouse in Germany

This blog is on the move!

2008-08-13T08:57:00.000+02:00

After much thought and consideration, I've decided to combine my blogs and everything will now be found at www.NoOrdinaryHomestead.com. There you can keep up with all our garden & home renovation projects, self-sufficiency things, our travels, Ayla, what's happening with the new baby and anything else that comes into our heads.

Hope you enjoy the new site and thanks for all your support! Please remember to update your bookmarks and links...as well as your reader software!

Got plans yet for the weekend??

2008-07-29T09:52:00.003+02:00

Well, it's that time of year again. And if you happen to be in the Frankfurt area on Saturday or Sunday, you should make your way to our village where the 57th annual Laternenfest (Lantern Festival for those non-Germans) is going on!

Every Saturday and Sunday evening a parade is held and the entire town attends or is in the parade. It's quite a bit of fun. People just sit around and wait for the procession, which lasts around an hour, and if you're lucky you can score some free drinks from one of the floats.

Last year we had our housewarming party on the same weekend, not knowing that they shut down all through traffic in the city for a few hours before the event starts. This year it will be a much more intimate party, with a few close friends and our grill, but hopefully even more fun! And next year, we'll have the little one tagging along too :)

We'll take photos and probably some video too to share with everyone who can't be here and post it here, along with our official thoughts about this year's events. Hubby is even taking a few days off, which should tell you just how much the people around here party down!

The walls are looking goooood

2008-06-27T16:31:00.000+02:00

So the neighbor came over last Saturday at 10 (he overslept and was supposed to be here at 8) and finished up the walls of the guest house. Read about him starting last Thursday here with previous photos.

It's really looking good and now we just need to get out there and paint. Since we should have enough paint left for those walls, we might just get to that in one of the next weekends...but no promises. Stefan will be coming back from the US on Saturday after working there on business all week so no chances of it happening this week but maybe in an upcoming one. As long as the weather will cooperate, we have all the time in the world ;-) The walls by the wine cellar are at least protected so we can even paint them when it's raining...the other wall is another story.

He did the work where we put in the bricks for the new window. Unfortunately we didn't think to take down the bird stuff above or we could have had him do that at the same time...but so it goes. Always something to do, right? And he cleaned up where they installed the vent from the bathroom so that is looking nice and clean now too. It's going to look like new when we get to painting it!

And this is the wall inside which you might remember was just exposed red building bricks before.

What the electrician has been up to...literally

2008-06-26T12:28:00.000+02:00

Before Stefan's party, we decided we better have the electrician come out and get some of the lights working around here so we could actually see our guests during the birthday party. Plus all the wiring seems to be about 30 years old and is starting to deteriorate and the last thing

He installed three new lights in the main part of the barn and it is bright as day with those things on now! We wanted to have them on a dimmer but unfortunately they didn't have the materials needed to do that...so we'll have to wait for a bit. But at least now we can definitely see every speck of dust & cobweb in the barn - which may not be such a great things ;-)

He also put up two new lights in the workshop area and this should greatly reduce the risk of Stefan chopping off any limbs while he's back there. It's very bright in there now too which is definitely helpful when you're doing woodworking projects!

The view of the workshop now with the lights on and all the doors closed. Very nice indeed...well the lighting, not the clutter and chaos ;-)

And behind the workbench, Stefan got a new switch for his lamp above the bench as well as 6 plugs behind the bench. No more plug strips in here...plus he has a safety switch to turn all the plugs off at once.

Just putzing around

2008-06-19T21:44:00.001+02:00

Ok, in German "putz" is what you call the plaster or stucco you put on walls. So yeah, I'm just making a bit of word play. Call it your German lesson for the day.

We asked one of our neighbors who happens to be a general contractor and painter if he would come by when he had some free time and cover up where we bricked in the bathroom window of the guest house and also around the corner where we've formed a wall by the wine cellar for the guest house closet. These two places have gone without plaster and paint long enough and it's not something we find all that fun so we're gladly going to pay the guy 180 bucks to take care of this.

After he didn't contact us for a week or so, we started to think the job was just too small for him or he wasn't interested. Then by chance we were in the restaurant across the street on Friday night and he walked in. Naturally he had to say something so he offered to come over last Saturday. That was the night of Stefan's birthday party which unfortunately wouldn't work out. So he asked if the following Friday would be ok instead (which would have been tomorrow.) No problem for us and we could be excited that it would finally get done.

But today at about 4pm he rang the doorbell and asked if I had time for him to get started. So he carried some long boards over which you saw in the last post about the compost pile (thankfully lives in the house next door so it wasn't far too go) and put on the edges for the wall here.

He'll be coming back at 8am on Saturday to plaster the rest of the wall and this one. Then we'll need a bit more paint to take care of this corner to. We've been playing with the idea of having a mural painted in here. Maybe something as if you were looking out into a vineyard or something. Of course then we'd need someone who knows what they're doing to come take care of that for us.

Maybe we'll just paint it the colors of the house for the time being and figure something else out along the way. Either way, these two spots are going to look massively better when this is finished...and we'll be one step closer to finally finishing things out over on the guest house and the farm in general.

The compost pile is gone!

2008-06-19T18:45:00.003+02:00

A bit late on the update but at least I'm getting to it sometime in the same month!

On June 2nd, the wonderful workers showed up again to deal with our compost pile dilemma. On a farm, things like this are very common here - but apparently none of the people doing the actual work at this company had seen anything like this before so they were yet again bumfuzzled. As you might recall, we had some guys out here a week before and they tried to use water to make the compost heap wet enough so they could vacuum it up. When this didn't work, they went home, called headquarters and told them someone needed to shovel the crap out (literally).

Hence they arrived again on June 2nd with a trailer in tow and shovels. But this time, they found that because of all the rain we'd had over the weekend, the pile was now very moist and they needed to call the big vacuum truck again to take out the water sitting on top. But guess what? This time, EVERYTHING was ready to be vacuumed out and a couple hours later, they were packing up again and on their way. Needless to say we wanted to beat them all but because Stefan was here in person this time, he managed to keep his cool somehow.

As it turns out, the hole was only about one-half meter deep instead of 1.5 meters like the sellers told us. Of course if we had known that, we probably would have taken matters into our own hands long before this. But whatever, it's gone now at least!

A bit hard to see in the photos but the hole is indeed empty. There is dirt on the bottom which is hard and compacted - the only way we knew they'd actually reached the bottom.

As you can see, we have a little bit of water in there now from recent rains but it dries out fairly quickly.

Now the question is when can we continue with this project? We actually want to build a hot tub in this space and will either dig out more ground and have the hot tub sitting low...or will use it as is, pour in the concrete base and go from there. A bit of planning and strategy planning to be done but we'll work it all out. And we may even convert the outhouse toilet to a real one on our sewer system because the pipes to the guest house toilet run just a few feet away and would be no trouble to connect to at all. Now wouldn't that make things fun?

Voila! I give you mud room & pantry!

2008-06-19T18:04:00.005+02:00

Once again I'm slacking. This past weekend we had a pretty big party here with a bunch of friends and family...it was a lot of work but thankfully also was fun - and will probably be the last of them for a long while. Yeah, we've said that before, right? But now I think we've finally had our fill of parties with 50+ people. A number something like 10-15 sounds so much nicer...but that's not the point of this post anyway.

One of my friends on twitter asked how the mudroom was coming along, and I realized I've once again been a bad little blogger and not written a thing about it since I've gotten it to a stable point once again. Well, there's still a lot of wine that needs to be moved over to the cellar (birthday presents for Stefan) but the lights are still out in there so that's just going to have to wait. Plus I'm not allowed to move them anyway. Tragic.

As you recall, I posted an update about the mudroom a few weeks ago (man, where does the time go?!?!?) That was right after I got the cabinets hung and I had yet to do anything to the pantry. Here's where we are now...

I ended up having ample space in the hanging cabinets for everything I needed...and then some! That's always pleasing. So now all our extra party wine and beer glasses have a permanent home.

We also got a new lamp installed by the electrician since he was here already doing work in the barn.

And the pantry has also filled up quickly. I have a pull out pantry in the kitchen itself but this is where I'm keeping all my decoration stuff, extra stashes of American goodies that we bring back from the US and other stuff that I happen to have large quantities of.

I'm totally thrilled with the way things turned out. I need to have some hooks put up on the empty wall to hang mops and things like that...but I have space in here for all the vacuums, mops, dog food and more. It's got to be one of our best ideas so far. To say I'm loving it is probably an understatement...and now I even have space for all sorts of things when we start canning - whenever we manage to grab the reigns of the garden that is! But that is another project for a whole other month!

We just THOUGHT we could get rid of this stuff...

2008-05-29T19:03:00.001+02:00

Today was supposed to be a very exciting day for us. When Stefan called to have the trash container picked up on Monday, he happened to ask them if they knew of a place that would take away the compost pile ("misthauf") in our courtyard. It's all sitting in a hole off to the side and fenced off - not really causing us any real concern...but at some stage we knew we wanted that stuff out of there so we could level out the space and one day use it as patio space, to put a hot tub or who knows what.

Surprisingly, the container company said we should give a sewage company a try which is also based in Frankfurt and they might be able to help. So we called and they said, "No problem. We'll be out on Thursday." Talk about shocking. Stefan described the type of stuff that it was, told them how large the pile is and the woman on the phone said it should be a couple hours perhaps but no problem at all. Rock on!

So it's Thursday and at 8:30 this morning, this huge truck showed up.

I thought, "Wow, excellent. They're actually half an hour early!"

So the guys get out and I show them the pile. The lead guy looks a bit skeptical but he seems to think it could be ok. I start to get the feeling at this point that he was not really informed about what exactly his task would be for the day.

They got their little vacuum pipe out and laid it through the courtyard. And then they pulled out a second one which supplied water to the pile. Everything was relatively dried out on top so it was a bit of a challenge for them to get started. It actually took them a good 15 minutes just to inspect, re-park their truck and pull the cable. But it's hot so ok.

And here they were. The guy on the left was pretty young and seemed to be a trainee of some sort. He got the fun job of standing down in the pile and shoveling while the big guy on the right controlled the hoses and the remote controls that started and stopped everything.

After about 20 minutes, they had made a very small dent in things. I wasn't too impressed but everything was very dried out and I know it was taking a whole lot of water to get things moist enough to where they could flow.

Almost an hour after they started, things weren't looking a whole lot better. I still can't be certain where the bottom of the heap is and they had only managed to get about the same amount of junk out of the hole as when I took the photo above. On top of things, their machine just didn't want to suck the stuff up. It would take some in, find something it didn't like and then get plugged up. So they would have to reverse the machine, blow stuff out until they found the culprit and then start again. In the last 30 minutes I don't think they actually managed to collect anything.

Unfortunately, the photo below is how they left things today. After an hour and a half (an hour of real sucking) they determined this just wasn't going to work. There was too much straw mixed in with everything and they therefore felt the only real way to get rid of this stuff was to shovel it out. But they had no idea where one would be able to dispose of it SO they would have to get back to us later. Joy.

So now the thing smells and has gotten all riled up. We personally would have been fine leaving it the way it was for a while longer but this woman assured us they could get rid of the stuff. Unfortunately when we called later, she said we had falsely informed her of what was in the pile and told her it was human fecal matter (which would have been easier to suck up but clearly more disgusting). Quite honestly, there is not a chance in hell we said that because we know that is not the case and why would we get these people out there to start something they would never be able to finish? But since Stefan called them from his office, he had the phone conversation taped and knew exactly what he actually did say when the woman tried to call him a liar.

What happens now?? Well, the disposal company is still trying to find a way to dispose of the stuff and if they should, then they have offered to come out and shovel it out. This would be the ideal situation since we really don't want to do it ourselves. Well, actually, I can't since I'm pregnant and I know Stefan can think of more fun things to do. They did call us this afternoon to give us an update and tell us that they do not have an ultimate solution yet but are working on things. Then they will let us know more after they have talked to the guys that were here today. So we'll see. They have a couple days to figure things out because we'll be at a music festival over the weekend. But hopefully by Tuesday at the latest we will have a solution!

Mud room + pantry update

2008-05-29T15:45:00.000+02:00

Soooo, I mentioned that some progress had been made in the mud room recently...and that is definitely the case. When Stefan's parents were here, the guys hung up our cabinets from our first apartment here in Germany that we have lugged around from place to place for the past couple years. They look quite good here I have to admit and now I just need to go buy some new shelves so I can start filling them up with all sorts of junk!

On the other hand, the rest of the mudroom still looks very similar to this:

YIKES! I painted the ceiling in the soon to be pantry and cleaned the walls a bit. Actually put the first shelf in there today but it's SO hot right now that I don't feel like doing much if it's not from the comfort of my couch where the portable air conditioner is running nearby. And it gives me a chance to catch up on blogs as well as do other work instead of random house stuff.

So this was the pantry before I cleaned and painted. It's still looking rather clinical in there after the paint but honestly I'm going to have shelves all over most of these walls and therefore don't feel that it would be worth the effort to paint the tiles or anything like that.

But I can say that it is 100% cleaner in there and no longer smells like a vat of varnish which is a massive improvement and in fact what I needed. The last thing I want is to start storing things in there like pasta or flour which will then take on that smell and taste. Ick! Anywho, with any luck I will get the new shelves in there next week sometime...and our electrician is coming out on June 9th so I hope to have a lamp I can put in there also which will brighten up the room a bit.

A progress report from 3 long days of work!

2008-05-27T10:29:00.000+02:00

Well, it's taken a few days to recover but the marathon of work while Stefan's parents were here has come to a close for now. We still have a few other small project that we are working on (like the mudroom which I'll post about in a bit) but we accomplished some very big tasks over the 3 days they were here working with us. I know you're curious about everything so here goes...

On Wednesday, Doris (Stefan's mom) & I started painting the base of the house. Stefan and I picked out a color last year that we thought would end up close to the sandstone on the house but apparently the lights in the store played some tricks on us. The color still turned out to be nice, just not quite as dark as we thought...

Here you can see our started progress on the part of the "sockel" we repaired last year but never got around to painting...

And voila! We have a fully painted base that instantly made the house look better. We still have to patch over a hole where they put the drainage pipe from the bath we added upstairs...but we'll get to that soon enough. We're still trying to decide on what color to paint the board that will hide it but also allow us to get back in there quickly should we need to access the pipe.

The guest house also got a fresh coat of paint and is looking massively better. We still need to pick up some green paint to take care of the new window frames...and build some shutters to cover the windows we no longer use - but one thing at a time...

And then the painting of the shutters on our house began. If you go back to the photos of the main house above, you'll remember there used to be a simple flower design on the shutters. We thought this was just too plain for such an amazing house so we found a stencil that we thought would suit the house much better.

First we (read Doris) repainted the shutters with a color very close to what used to be on them...and then wsing one of the colors from the trim running above the house, Doris stenciled on the new design. We absolutely love the way it turned out and feel it gives the house a much more grand feeling now. Of course we still have all the shutters on the front and other side of the house to do...but the shutters on the front have to be replaced because they are extremely weathered and just not up to being sanded down and repainted. But thankfully the shutters on the alley side of the house are in perfect condition and will only require us to buy more paint so we can finish them up.

Part of the reason for this frenzy is because we are hosting Stefan's 30th birthday here on June 14th and one of the tasks was cleaning out the barn so we can put some tables in there should the weather not be too great on the party day. Thankfully this task didn't take as long as we thought it might and we finally remembered just how huge this barn is when it isn't full of junk!

For the party we're going to get a roll of outdoor carpet to lay down so we don't have so much dust kicking up while people are in there...

And one of the finds in the barn was this little bench which will get a fresh coat of paint and will hide a bit of the wall here until we get the vines down and start refinishing the walls of the storage building...a project for who knows when. Speaking of storage rooms, I did some work in them on Friday too since we had once again reached the point of not being able to walk into any of them. Not good. But a couple hours of work and they are looking great again - and we can actually find things in them!

Here was our trash container after we'd started the barn clean-out. I didn't get a photo of it after that because they came to pick it up earlier than expected yesterday....but we managed to fill it up most of the way again. It seems that the trash here just never ends.

Another little project I took on was putting up a shelf in the pig stalls which has become a storage area for all our building materials. Things were just piled everywhere which prevented us from finding anything - an extremely common theme in this place!

And, yes, there was more. One of the projects the guys started on Thursday was putting down floor trim in the guest house. It became a more complicated process than they'd hoped because most of the walls in there are still not 100% straight and some of the boards we bought were also a bit warped...but where would the fun be otherwise, right? Now the guest house is looking quite finished (aside from the closet which is still a scary situation which we will not be taking on just yet either). But you may notice there is a cabinet and TV missing from this photo. We hijacked it for our own bedroom because we just don't have that many guests...and when they are in there, they're usually ready to pass out. We'll probably get a smaller TV to hang on the wall in there at some point - but hey, we're not made of money here folks! ;-)

And since I don't think they have been photographed before....here are the mounted shower heads in the guest house. Look good, right? We haven't used them personally yet but we hear good things.

So a big thanks goes out again to Stefan's parents who kept us going through all this. Where their energy and enthusiasm comes from, I do not know. But there are more working marathons already in the works (yes, apparently we have lost our minds) but to be honest, we'd like to have as many things done around here as possible before the baby comes so that we don't have to worry about too much the first 6 months or so and can just enjoy the new addition to the family. And then, of course, we need the baby to grow big and strong quickly because we need another helper around here! Things go so much faster with 8 hands than with 4!

More mud room love and the to do list

2008-05-21T16:06:00.004+02:00

Way back in December (which now seems like years ago), we did a bit of drywalling in the mudroom to accompany the other chaos that was going on in our guest house. We'd gotten things to a mostly acceptable state in there, and just ran out of steam and time so we left things the way they were for another day. In the picture below, you can see our drywall job, which wasn't as bad as it could have been. I then filled the seems and have to say I did a damn fine job. In fact, our electrician was in that room shortly after I'd done it and asked if we had a professional come in. I was quite flattered (to say the least) and then pretty agitated that our idiot contractor who did the drywall in the guest house left things looking so crappy...but I won't go back to dwelling on that guy for now.

Stupidly, I didn't take a photo after I'd done the seams, even though I was pretty certain I had. Who knows, maybe the camera ate it...

Today, I took the liberty of painting one wall of the mudroom. Here's the finished product:

If you click on the photos I'm sure you can see the seams better, but I didn't sand anything because I HATE that part of it...and a lot of it will be covered by cabinets so I just don't care that much.

Stefan's parents will be coming to spend a couple days of insanity with us and helping us get a few projects done. Obviously there are things I shouldn't really do now that I'm pregnant but so far it's not slowing me down much. Thankfully it's still early though so I can get away with this...in a few months, that will not be the case anymore so we're trying to get as much done as possible now. Oh, and we're having another party here in less than a month so that's another big motivator! We decided to host Stefan's 30th birthday party here instead of at a restaurant nearby...just not enough people coming to warrant the huge space we would have had there...but we're really looking forward to having everyone here. Plus a lot of them will get to see a whole lot of progress since the last time they were here we hadn't done the guest house, redone the bottom part of the exterior wall of the house or started the mudroom project.

I won't say what is on the agenda just yet...but there is plenty I can assure you. Ok, I will let you in on a few things....

Paint the house (everything on the lower part of the main house inside the courtyard where I started last year plus the guest house - all of which badly need it)
Put the floor trim down in the guest house and a few other small projects in there to finish things off
Take down the shutters on the front of the house (and the rest too assuming time and weather permit), sand and repaint. This is a pretty huge task considering every window on the house has shutters...so we're talking 15 sets of shutters to sand, repaint and stencil. Good times.
Organize ground level of barn to allow people to sit in there in case the weather for the party isn't grand (although we know it will be!)

If time permits, there's about a billion other projects...so hopefully the weather will cooperate with us. Oh and did I mention we have trash container number 13 (I think) here? Gosh I love having those things around!!! Just so practical...if only they weren't so big and ugly :-)

A rant about customs offices

2008-05-14T15:58:00.000+02:00

I realized that there is a risk of the customs agency here in Germany finding out who I am after I write this...and then I will never be able to pick up another package at customs without having to jump through many more hoops than usual - but those people just make me nuts and anyone who may be living in Germany will undoubtedly encounter these people at least once...so considered yourself warned!!

Since we moved here in August 2001, I have been in 3 different customs offices; one for each house/city we've lived in. The first one was a pain but I think we were only in there twice - one of which was when we got to pay taxes on a very special wedding gift that was a surprise from a friend in the US.

Then we moved close to Darmstadt and that customs office was a dream. The people working in there were always super friendly. I was short a penny once and started to head out to the car to get one when one of the guys opened his drawer and pulled one out for me. I actually looked forward to getting things via customs because of those people.

And that brings us back to the lovely office I get to visit now in Hanau. The people working in there move slower than sloths...and there have actually been times when we saw the "workers" just sitting in front of their computer staring the background image. It was the pretty windows tropical island shot so perhaps he was visualizing himself there...but he spaced out at least 10 minutes which was quite a feat.

So today I already assumed I would have a problem. The wrong way to go in there but what can I say. Actually I told Stefan before I left that I was looking forward to having more fun stories to share when I got home. I walked into the office and there were 3 guys working in there. One was helping someone in the post "section" (they've built a little doorway within the office that you have to walk into to be serviced) and the guy told me to sit outside.

I take a seat and then start taking notice of the other two guys in the office. Apparently they are not qualified to handle processing post packages, asking the customer what is in the box and looking up the percentages owed in their little book. So I sit there 10 minutes until the lady in front of me finally leaves. I get called in and hand over my paperwork. This was the guy's lucky day because I happened to be picking up 3 large boxes (1 our new stroller, 1 the car seat that goes with it and a box of supplies from my company).

He asks what is in the boxes. So I start with the paperwork in his hand. You are supposed to bring a receipt of what is in the box and what you paid. Naturally I have all this in English because everything was from the US. I explain what everything is and point out which items they are on each receipt.

The guy (who was probably close to 60), looks and everything and then at me with a sort of dumb look. I know I'm now in trouble. So we start again. He points to the looooooong receipt from Babies R Us and says, "The stroller was $500."

"No," I responded. The stroller and car seat which are here are only the first two items on this receipt. $129.99 and $79.99." He seems to find it confusing but writes it on his form. Then things get really complex...

As I mentioned, one of the boxes was stuff from my company, some shaving oil & jelly, plus little bottles, which we'll be giving out as samples. The customs notice they mail out says to bring the original bill of sale...so I did. But that bill was for significantly more money than I'd shipped to myself to I itemized things down for them on the bill. That, again, was mind blowing and the guy kept trying to wrap his mind around the concept that I had only a portion of an order in the box he had sitting in his back room. Apparently he had never heard of repackaging stuff and fussed that I can't do things this way and so on. So I said if he'd tell me just what he needed I would go and create that for him and bring it back. But I think he just wanted me out of his office by then so he gathered everything up and went to his desk to start looking up numbers.

Ten minutes later, he finally hands me two stapled stacks of paperwork with tax codes, percentages and total values of the packages. Next stop - the cashier. There I find one of the guys who had been staring at his computer screen before. Lovely.

Surprisingly, he sits down and starts working on the paperwork. Right on. He types, switches to a second computer, makes a phone call, complains about the speed of the computer....and then reaches a sum. I pay the surprisingly low sum and you would think we'd be done - but oh no. The cashier then hand writes two receipts of the amounts due (two sets of paperwork, ya know) and finally says we are done. Another 10 minutes killed.

By now I notice that the hallway in front of the post pickup is quite full. There are at least 10 people standing there and more arriving every few minutes. But what is fantastic is that inside the office is a new guy sitting at one of the desks, doing who knows. And the post guy has closed the door to the package room and disappeared. A long line of people outside, the guy has been back at work 1 hour (the office is open Mon-Fri 7:10am - 12:00 and 12:45 - 3pm)... but all that work I put him through (and the women before me) just wore him out. Awesome.

Thankfully, I just took my packages and got outta dodge before things got ugly. I think the people standing in the hall were ready to jump me as I walked by with each of the three big boxes. They may not have wanted what I had but I'm not sure they cared as long as they could leave with something.

Hopefully the next episode will be a bit less eventful, but I'm sure that won't be the case. I just know I won't be going in there near Christmas or New Years if possible. Stefan went to pick something up last year and one of the guys was actually carrying a firearm. Talk about terrifying! Lord help us all if one of those guys loses it!

Catching up on things

2008-05-09T18:09:00.000+02:00

Ok, it's been too long once again since I last posted. But that doesn't mean things have been at a standstill around here! For one, we got the glass replaced in the front door! And I got the bill yesterday which only came out to €63 so we're pretty pleased about that as well.

Tomorrow we are going to finally buy the floor trim for the guest house so that when Stefan's parents come to visit in a couple weeks, it will be here, ready and waiting to be put on. We also will be ordering a step for outside our kitchen door so you don't step off into oblivion when you walk out that door (over a foot door to the ground). And Stefan and his dad will be taking down the shutters from the front of the house, sanding them and repainting them so the house will be looking fresh and nice for the spring. We still need to finish painting the bottom half of the house also (among a million other things) but those are the items on their agenda (at their insistence, not ours!)

Why aren't we do all this ourselves? Surely we're capable! Well yes - but they are running out of projects on their own home so they figure we have plenty projects ourselves, why not borrow some. And Stefan's family will be in town on June 15th for his birthday so we want the place looking its best. AND finally, I can't be up 3 floors on a ladder because there's a bun in the oven. Yep, we are going to have a new addition to the family and it will not have any fur this time around!

We actually got to see the baby again today in an ultrasound and there was quite a bit of movement this time around. Maybe we have an athlete on our hands which would be a miracle since Stefan and I are not really sporty, per say. We're going to need something to refer to it by for the next few weeks until we know if it's a boy or girl...otherwise we may just go on what it looks like in this photo which is a bit like an alien. ;-)

What do you mean the glass is green??

2008-04-01T12:28:00.004+02:00

After a lovely couple of days in Italy (mostly the region around Venice), we got back here very exhausted and happy to be home. As it turned out, we must have been a bit more tired than we thought because on Monday (March 24th) we started out the door to take the puppy for a walk, I grabbed a set of keys, we closed the front door and then I realized I had the keys to my truck in my hand and not the front door. Great. Usually this wouldn't be an issue because we have a door unlocked at the back of the house...but naturally that was still locked because we had been on vacation.

We tried popping the door off the hinges in the back but the lock kept the door from being lifted off the hinges...and we tried jimmying open a window in front of the house. Thank God we hadn't closed our front gate yet or we really would have been in trouble and our neighbors might have started to give us some strange looks.

So we tried calling a locksmith. But at luck would have it, we had hardly any change in our pockets...and just as the operator finally connected us, we ran out of money. Lovely.

On to plan C. Which was - break out the glass in the front door. This was probably one of the most painful things we've had to do around here, but thankfully it's just a simple single pane of glass - but it was still not easy to smash a rock into it!

As you can see, the glass in this door is actually green. It was pretty shocking to us as well. But we know that will regular clear glass it should let a lot more light into the room which it could certainly benefit from.

I just had our next door neighbor come over (which conveniently owns a door and window company - he put in our lovely new windows for the guest house) and he's going to order the glass for us. Not sure yet whether he'll be able to take care of it this week because he just came back from vacation himself, but at the latest we should have glass back in there next week - and hopefully we won't have to go through this again! At least we will be able to see clearly through the glass after this too since the older piece was quite warped. The carpenter from next door even asked if it was plexiglass since the glass seemed so thin. And thankfully the weather has gotten much warmer so we don't have to worry about losing a bunch of heat outside. Ah, the fun of owning a house!

Times this house has locked us out of or into it: 3

Spring Cleaning Closets

2008-03-31T09:51:00.003+02:00

We've been attempting to do some spring cleaning around here and get rid of some stuff that we haven't looked at in over a year. Amazingly enough, there are a lot of things like that around here. A couple weekends ago we cleaned out our closets because things were just overflowing in our extra room upstairs which doubles as a closet at the moment. There are long built-in closets along one end and we've got a couple Billy shelves in there full of clothes as well. As it turned out, we filled 4 1/2 large garbage sacks with clothes that we've been lugging around for quite a while now. So not only have we managed to avoid rebuilding our closets right now, but we can actually find things in our closet now too! Such an amazing concept.

One really should go through their closets at least once a year. It's amazing how quickly you can forget what you have in there, especially when you're not wearing all the clothes all year. I have many, many clothes which I've vowed to put on this year again - finally...and hopefully I can stick to that plan. Otherwise I may have to eliminate a few more items next year during spring cleaning!

Some say you get what you pay for....

2008-03-14T16:45:00.000+01:00

This post was a bit too painful for me to make three weeks ago when this actually happened...but I guess time has dulled the pain a bit.

My wonderful husband bought me 120 multi-colored tulips for Valentine's Day and our house was just filled with them. I actually had a buy a couple of vases because I didn't have anything I could put them all in. So we ended up buying two large glass vases...and I still had to use a couple pitchers later on for the tulips. They were absolutely gorgeous but eventually the day comes when you have to dispose of the fresh flowers and clean out the vases. That day was a Friday...February 22nd, 2008.

I was standing by the kitchen sink with my hands in one of the new vases, washing out all the flower gunk and thinking how incredibly heavy the vase was. It's about 14 inches tall and 8-10 inches round with a short pedestal on the bottom. It's some of the thickest glass I've ever seen, sorta like lead glass. As I was washing the vase, it slipped out of my hands and fell about an inch into the sink.

My first thought was, "Oh no, I just broke my new vase!" But I picked it up and examined it and there were no cracks, chips or marks anywhere on it. Then I looked down into the sink and saw it...

The picture doesn't do it justice but our IKEA Dömsjo sink cracked like nothing I've ever seen before. If you click on the photo you can see it much better. The noticeable crack/chip in the middle is where the vase actually hit the bottom of the sink. What you can't see is that the right side of this crack (which is actually towards the wall where the faucet is mounted - I took the photo from the side of the sink so you could see it best) extends all the way to the back of the sink where it's molded upward. The crack going to the left basically wraps around the edge of the sink and carries almost all the way up to join the first crack I described. So I basically managed to break out the bottom of the sink with this vase.

I was NOT amused and after doing a bit of research on google, I found that IKEA actually pulled this sink from the market in the US for a while because of shoddy construction. I didn't find anyone over here complaining about the sink breaking but some did say that the ceramic isn't very high quality and they had problems with staining and so on. That I have noticed a bit but with a good cleaner I've never had any trouble making the sink white again and have otherwise just loved the sink.

So what now? Well, I'm going to beg Stefan to call IKEA and try to work some of his magic with them and see if we can't get it exchanged at their expense. And if not, I guess we'll just be investing the 200 euros ourselves to get a new one. The counter is already fit for this sink as well as the cabinet underneath so getting a different one in hopes that it would hold up better would just be more frustration than it's worth. And I will certainly be a LOT more careful with the new sink and think twice about what I'm cleaning in there and how I'm holding it.

Not really sure when we'll get around to this now but maybe I can get Stefan to call the lovely customer service people in the next couple of weeks. In store for us this weekend is finally adjusting the closet rods in our extra room and moving around the shelving in the built in closets. We also need to finally shave down the corners of the shelves where the electrician laid the satellite cables which caused the shelves to no longer fit. At the moment we can't see the couches in there because they are piled up with all sorts of things so we have our work cut out for us. And we're planning to clean out our closets in general and eliminate some of the clothes we haven't worn since we moved to Germany 7 years ago...spring cleaning at its best!

Have a great weekend!!

Easter in the air

2008-03-14T15:28:00.004+01:00

For the last two years, we have been traveling over Easter so I don't really do much decorating. In addition, we didn't have our own house most of the last 6 years we've been in Germany so I didn't really get into the decorating mood. But I was at Metro the other day (like Costco & Sam's Club) and saw some hanging eggs I just had to have.

Since last winter, I've fallen in love with the concept of using stuff to decorate our lamp over the dining table. It's always a focal point when we have people over and I really like the way things generally turn out when we decorate there. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we had a fake garland up there which looked quite good. They had it up in IKEA that way and I commented that I wished we had a lamp like that. Of course Stefan just looked at me and laughed at my blonde moment....because we had exactly that lamp in our kitchen! Doh!

Anyway, this is what my Easter decor currently consists of. A bit pathetic overall but since we won't be here anyway and don't really have anyone coming over to visit before then, I figure it's at least a good start. I also have some egg shaped candles on the table below...festive, eh? ;-)

And in case you make the photo bigger and wonder what is written on the eggs...they say "Frohe Ostern" - which means "Happy Easter" in German!

That time of the year again

2008-03-14T15:24:00.002+01:00

The gardening fever is striking us again (thankfully since we have a nice big space to utilize back there) and we've just starting a ton of seeds....of course we are only writing about it on our self-sufficient / garden blog, Self-Reliant Yuppies, so if you want to see what we're up to, please go drop by! I've also posted a bunch of recipes I recently tried out on there if you're a foodie like myself ;-)

Recent posts:
What we got from Burpee seeds
Starting seeds in newspaper pots

Come tweet with me!

2008-02-07T10:25:00.000+01:00

So I've jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and now I'm looking for some friends! Fellow bloggers and tweeters, where are you at? I'll be cruising around a few houseblogs in the near future since I usually just read my favs via google reader...but anyone reading this who wants to start tweeting with me, I'm looking forward to talking at you soon! I'm still learning and not really the best at keeping up to the moment with it...but I'm addicted so that has to say something about it.

If you Twitter and want to maintain multiple accounts at once (like myself), try out twhirl.

And now trash excites me...

2008-02-06T10:13:00.000+01:00

I've probably mentioned it before but we have 4 trash cans which are used on a regular basis here: Blue for paper, Black for regular household trash, Green for garden cuttings and Brown for biotrash. In addition, we also have special yellow plastic sacks for the disposal of packaging and plastic items. Quite a bit to keep up with but at least I feel like I'm doing something for the environment through all this.

From the time we bought the house in August 2006, we have had no service for our biotrash can. We weren't really sure why but regardless of what was in the can, they would drive right by it on trash day.

Since I was unsure of my German skills at time (and bounce back and forth on my capabilities still), I asked Stefan to take care of it. Unfortunately that turned into a more complicated task than anticipated. He wanted to go into the local courthouse to take care of it in person....but they're only open a few hours a week. We knew there would be a couple of days he'd take off and hoped to get it done then. Then when all those opportunities passed, we figured when he was on gardening leave for three months we'd take care of it. Again, it didn't happen because we would either forget about it on the days it was open or we were too busy doing other stuff for the renovation of the guest house.

Eventually I took matters into my own hands and just called them. Stefan has so much going on with other things, I figured I could at least get the ball rolling in case we needed to complete a form or something else. My phone conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi. I've got a biotrash can here but whenever I put it on the street for collection, they just pass it by.

The trash official: That can't be. Every trash can is collected each time.

Me: Ok, well we put our can out several times over the past year and they've never picked it up.

So she asks for our address and then explains that we don't have a chip in our trashcan and they can't pick it up because they wouldn't know who to bill. Ah ha! The previous owner kept everything that would have gone into the bio trash and used it in his compost. We'd actually love to do something like that ourselves but still haven't finished our compost bin...and there are always some things that you just don't want to throw in there. Plus we don't have a chipper so all the vines and things like that would take forever to decompose.

Naturally my next question to the official was, "How can I get the chip??" It was actually a rather simple process: I put the trash can out on a specific day and they drove around and chipped it. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't know whether they'd been by or not but they left a little bright orange sticker on the can. Otherwise I couldn't see the chip at all and was still a bit concerned that we might still be stuck with this yucky trash.

BUT yesterday morning the moment of truth came. I put the biotrash can out on Tuesday night and when the collection truck drove around in the morning I watched him pull up to our can, drive out the little arm to scoop up our can, lift it up and actually dump the trash in his truck. Talk about exciting! I know, I know...it's the little things in life that really get to me. ;-) But after more than a year of not being able to use the thing, it really is a relief to finally have them picking up this trash. Hopefully I'll use it less and less in the future....but things like chicken bones are always really important to have a place for. Flushing them down the toilet just isn't an option, and neither is putting them in my compost pile!

On a lighter note...

2008-01-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

How do you know you've done WAY too much business with your trash container company?
You receive a Christmas card from them!

I was just taking down some Christmas cards hanging in our kitchen and had to laugh to myself. Sure, we had about 10 containers last year from them and the owners of the company live right around the corner from us, but we were still quite amused when it arrived!

Ok, back to getting rid of the Christmas stuff!

What is wrong with kids these days??

2008-01-21T11:31:00.000+01:00

Here in Germany there is an increasing awareness of a problem among the youth of this country. In general, I guess this would include "kids" from 12-19, but the problem certainly begins at home. You may have heard about it in the news: here in Germany there are a large number of immigrants from countries like Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic, etc. In recent months, it seems primarily Turkish immigrants that are causing the problems, but I imagine they can't be solely to blame. The problem is this: these kids apparently have too much free time and aggression and they are beating the crap out of people on the street with hardly any provocation.
It started in Munich when a man asked a 17- year-old Greek & 20-year-old Turkish national to put out their cigarettes. They were in subway station and smoking is banned there. The kids, apparently offended that this older man would feel he has a right to request that they obey the law, just started whaling on him...and there were security cameras there for the world to watch.

A few days later, a similar attack happened and since then there have been more or more reports hitting the news that things like this are happening. In fact, one town which is part of our town fellowship had an attack last weekend. In Oberdorfelden (pop. 2000 I would guess), a few of these newly coined "youth criminals" jumped some other kids who were coming home drunk from a bar. They stole their wallets, cell phones, watches, iPod and anything else of value. And not one day later, an elderly woman was beaten to death at 5:30 am in Frankfurt. All I can say is what the hell is going on here?

Is this what happens when society just loses control of an immigrant population? I'm sorry to make this a question of immigrants and their upbringing (being that I am an immigrant in this country myself) but when the statistics show that 50% of the youth committing these crimes are foreigners, you have to take notice.

But honestly, it's not just a question of heritage; this is a much bigger problem than that. It's a matter of these kids not having family that care AT ALL what these kids do. The parents are happiest when the kids don't come home every night because then they don't have to deal with them. The kids don't respect their parents, their friends or even themselves; and with every generation it just gets worse. The adults feel overworked and underpaid, they are tired at night and just don't want to deal with their kids and possibly regret ever having them at all. Some of them probably wish the government would take over responsibility of them - and some of them will have that wish met when their kids end up in prison.

All this is causing major upset in the German political system right now. Some say let them be, we can't kick these foreigners out just because they're breaking the law. But the Conservatives have had enough. They want them booted the first time they commit a crime. Personally I will fully support that - or at least a"3 strikes, you're out policy." Why should these criminals be allowed to stay in this country when all they want to do is cause trouble? Maybe we should just send them all to Siberia like this kid. Needless to say it's a chaotic situation, and upcoming elections on January 27th in the state of Hessen should be interesting. The vote is being ruled by this topic which has caused a lot of harsh words to be said between politicians.

Personally, we're just hoping to stay out of the way and pray that nothing happens in our little town. Five kilometers away from us is definitely close enough to open our eyes and we're all much more cautious now when we're out at night. Is this the beginning of the end of civilization?

Finally meeting our hero - "The Guy"

2008-01-16T13:36:00.000+01:00

Here in our little village, there are quite a few other timber frame houses, but few of them have been taken care of like ours. Some of them have recently have the timbers covered up because it was the cheapest option to repair them - and many (if not most) of the old houses have had their original windows replaced with plastic-framed windows. This last little action makes us physically sick because not only is it tacky, but it's actually very bad for the house. The original wood frames allow the house to "breathe" which means less risk of condensation building up in the house and slowly destroying your beams and walls. Yes, you can open the windows during the day and allow the moisture to equalize - but during the winter this really doesn't seem like a very nice option.

There is one house, though, which is about two blocks away from us, which has been beautifully restored. In fact, they actually one a prize for their restoration work a few years back. We've been told the owners did a lot of work themselves and used original materials whenever possible which is something we have at least mildly attempted, especially when working on the old parts of the house. Part of our reasoning is because we know that using modern materials will just result in it having to be redone in a year or so versus 10 years so why not take the extra effort now?

But the point of all this rambling is that we are very intimidated by the owners of this house, particularly the husband who we generally refer to as "The Guy." Since we've lived in the house, we've seen the couple quite often, usually when they're driving their ancient tractor past our house to one of their farming plots - or riding in a wagon being pulled by his huge work horses. These people are living a life more back to the roots and do quite a bit of haying and field work around there themselves. That's an admirable task already. But we've also been told that "The Guy" also works in the food additives and chemicals industry and a few years ago, he just decided he couldn't take it anymore. So they grow most of their own veggies and fruits and try to live off their own land as much as possible - hence we call them our heroes. And of course it doesn't hurt that "The Guy" looks completely rough and tough when he passes by. His eyes will just stare right through you and he's always got on a well worn hat, suspenders and big work boots. He's got the rugged cowboy look down pat and looks so cool doing it - as well as scary! And did I mention he's probably only 40-45 years old?

We've lived here in the house for about a year now and this past Sunday was the first time we've actually talked to "The Guy." We have at him and his wife whenever we pass each other but no opportunity has really come up to talk to them and we didn't just want to wander into their courtyard or anything. We were out walking Ayla and he approached on his wagon with two of his massive horses strapped to the front. We moved over to the side to allow him to pass on the little farm road (barely big enough for a car or wagon to drive down) and keep Ayla from spooking his horses, when he did the most incredible thing - he pulled over to talk to us!

He said he wanted to finally say "hello" since we have never really met and even told us to come by his own place so we could see what they've done in their own house. He offered names of some of his contractors as we discussed putting in a second set of windows in the two rooms that face the street (to cut down on noise and keep some more heat in the house) and told us several times to drop by some time to see how their own windows turned out. We were stunned to find out he is incredibly nice and we probably didn't need to be scared of him to begin with - but he will still always be "The Guy" to us.

Not only is he a potential wealth of information about the renovation of old houses (they personally worked on theirs 8-10 years, he said) but he is also head of the local city council which we would really like to get involved in. We've recently learned that the township ("Gemeinde") our town belongs to is doing nothing good for our town at all. One of the three towns is having all the funds concentrated on it and we even heard that the current mayor actually moved into that "privileged" town before the last election because he felt he wouldn't be elected living in the smallest of the three. I'm sorry but I just find that absurd and totally unacceptable. So we'll see what happens over the next few years in our little Büdesheim - and hopefully we can change a few of the backwards ways!

Oh, it's on! Laundry time!!!

2008-01-15T15:14:00.000+01:00

Well, I guess I spoke too soon. Shortly after I posted about sitting here waiting on the repair guy, he showed up. Speak of the devil, I guess...

It was the same guy as last time and he came in and got right to work. I was rather impressed when 15 minutes later he had the new part in and the machine was working again with renewed vigor. The process of printing out the receipt almost took longer than the repair itself!

Of course, the first load of laundry is already in there and I have to say I'm pretty excited to have it working again. I'm actually almost looking forward to catching up on the laundry - which is probably mostly just me looking forward to having piles of clean clothes around again instead of dirty, funky ones. And of course not needing to buy out all the supplies of white undershirts from our local retailers makes me happy too.

Happy washing, everyone!

Waiting on repairmen...

2008-01-15T14:12:00.000+01:00

There are few things I dislike more than sitting around, waiting for someone to show up and having no idea when and if he actually will. When I last talked about our washer/dryer machine that which is the fritz, I mentioned that the service guy who came out didn't have the correct part with him to fix the machine that day but set up another appointment for a repairman to come out today, between 1 - 2 pm. I know these people get bogged down and probably have 5 other calls to deal with each day - maybe even more (although I somehow doubt it since that would almost certainly be far too much work in one day...but I won't go into that rant right now!) As I sit here now at 2:15pm, I have to start wondering if this guy will show up.

We're at a seriously sad state as far as laundry goes now, having decided to just hold out on washing anything until today. After all, it was just another week...Now if no one appears today, I fear it will be another week before the machine is repaired....and we're almost definitely going to need to find a laundromat before then. Stefan and I are generally clean people, don't get me wrong. It's the 100 pound furry black beast we refer to as Ayla that causes the problem! We've actually reached a stage here this winter where we need to vacuum the house at once daily to keep the dirt down. It's just terrible.

I have to say that if I had a job outside of the house, I would be rather agitated about this today. Thankfully I have plenty of other things to keep me occupied - but I also can't just leave the house or go work on anything outside since I won't hear the doorbell...hostage to the repairman - priceless.