A virtual tour of the new house

Posted by Nadine

There will be actual quilting content on this blog before the weekend is out (promise!), but I did also promise pictures of the new house! I took my camera on Wednesday when the girls and I went to see the house, but of course I forgot to actually use it! The lovely lady that lives in the house now was kind enough to send bunches of pictures so now I have some to look at and share and can dream about the house until we move. We’ll begin the tour at the front gate:

This is the original brick front of the house that was retained through the renovation. I think from looking at the other pictures of the renovation process that the roof was raised by a foot or so which makes the top floor a bit easier to use for actual living space. Over the top of the gate you can see the roof of the cottage. The three windows at the bottom are in the kitchen and dining area, and the three above are in the front bedroom that’s on the second floor. Continue reading →

Patchwork Times: Ruby slippers and a gift from the house gods

Posted by Nadine

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have read that the house hunt is on again. I’ve decided that I really can’t peacefully coexist with spiders that are 3″ across! No lie! They really are THAT big when spread out, with bodies to match; more like tiny tarantulas than house spiders I tell ya’! There have been others since the last time I wrote about the spider issue, and in fact they’ve only gotten bigger since then. We have no idea how they get into the house, or where they’re hiding before they show up on the walls or the floor at unexpected times.

Honestly, this house is so full of defects and actual holes that we couldn’t possibly ferret them all out to close them up to keep the house anywhere close to spider-free. When you consider all the other issues we’ve had with the house and the exceedingly freakish and totally unhelpful landlords, the spiders are just the straws that broke the camel’s back. We’re done, and we’re moving on! Continue reading →

The very end of the Moving Saga

Posted by Nadine

The Big Move is officially over. We finally received the keys to the garage on the 21st of June, nearly three months after we moved into the house. That was not how it was supposed to be; the landlords really took advantage of us on that one, I think. In any case, here’s the view of the ‘Stang’s new home, our strange and unique garage:

The landlords built this garage to house their motorhome, so it’s very tall and very long. The doors are just weird; instead of a normal garage door that lifts up (automatically at the touch of a button in a perfect world), these are bi-fold doors that open to the side, with a smaller door inside one of the bigger doors so that you can get inside to open up the bigger doors from the inside. I won’t drag you through the myriad steps necessary to get the car in and out of the garage; suffice it to say that the doors are not easy to open, and a total pain to close making the whole process extremely unfriendly to the user.

But it is a garage, which we didn’t have before, so it is an improvement, however painful it might be to get in and out. Because it’s so long, there’s plenty of room for “garage things” like winter tires, a workbench, all the bikes, tools, cleaners, car care stuff and plenty of garden tools. And it can be warmed in the winter if needed, thanks to a giant radiator on the side wall. I’m not sure why it’s heated, but hey, we can be warm while we detail the car if it’s cold outside.

No need for the radiator this morning though, as it was a warm 75-ish outside when we washed the car at the little wash rack just on the edge of our neighborhood behind the local Opel dealer, and then detailed it with some much needed TLC in the garage. My poor baby sat out on the driveway for nearly three months baking in the summer weather and being a big target for the local avian community, so the cleaning and care were definitely long overdue. At least it will stay cleaner longer in its new home. Now I can quilt for the rest of the day! 🙂

Storage, closets and expansions

Posted by Nadine

Cruising around in blogland this morning, I had a good chuckle over this post at unclutterer. Heh, welcome to my world of houses with no built in storage or closets. For the past eight years, I’ve lived in German houses, and the typical German house has no closets whatsoever and the bathroom storage, if there is any, is laughable.

As I understand it, homeowners are taxed based on the number of rooms in a house, and a closet is considered a room, no matter how small. A laundry room, however, even one so big as mine which is the size of a medium bedroom, is not a room because it’s “unfinished,” since the walls aren’t all pretty and smooth with wallpaper or beautiful paint, and the pipes are exposed on the walls and ceiling. Go figure. I’d be happy with an “unfinished” closet, thank you very much, and I’m slightly surprised that the Germans haven’t figured out that loophole yet. The pipes sticking out of the wall could double as wall hooks or closet poles.

Seriously though, I’ve spent the last eight years searching out creative storage solutions that don’t cost a bundle, but look half way decent, which is a pretty tall order really. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that JC Penney could deliver bookshelves and dressers Priority Mail. Instead of something nice that I might like to keep for a long time, I end up with this kind of junk, just to have something to use that’s better than nothing at all and doesn’t cost a small fortune.

Amy at MomAdvice penned a post that caught my eye this morning as well. I laughed a little at this one too, since I did spend a huge amount of time decluttering my house before the move, but the big holes I have in the house now are more because I have 30-40% more space here than I did in the other house than because I got rid of anything. And I do have holes; as a matter of fact, I have an entire room that I don’t really know what to do with.

The room on the side of my studio, dubbed “the Library” since that’s where we thought most of the books were going to live, is kind of purpose-less at the moment. We’d also planned to put the sofa bed in there if family every came to visit. (snort. Like THAT will ever happen.) The majority of the books ended up elsewhere with Plan B, some in the dining room and some in the office, and since I’m not anticipating a horde of relatives at my door, well, there it sits, a fairly big, empty hole in the house.

I didn’t really mean to take over nearly a third of the house…

Every morning I walk in there and think, “Wow, the natural light in here is just wonderful” and every afternoon I wander in there and enjoy the relatively cool temperature when my studio is feeling like an oven, and it’s only the middle of May. The lighting is better in there all afternoon as well, probably because it’s a smaller room and the light reflects off of the white walls. So what’s a girl to do? Start moving furniture, of course!

And even if I eventually resort to purchasing an air conditioner to keep from baking up here come August, it’s cheaper and easier to climate control a smaller room as opposed to this wide open studio. Come to think of it, keeping warm in the winter will probably be easier as well. And the ~~Library~~ Little Studio has something else the Studio doesn’t have: a door to close off noise from the rest of the house when I really need some quiet, and keep the cats away from my work if needed.

Oh, the irony of it all: I have a 450 square foot studio, and I’m moving part of my work area into the 126 square foot cubby hole/annex on the side. It’s kind of a bummer when what you think is going to be so perfectly wonderful doesn’t turn out that way in reality. I really can’t fit everything in the Little Studio, so obviously this is an expansion rather than a wholesale move. I didn’t really mean to take over nearly a third of the house, but it seems I’m about to do just that. I feel no guilt though, it’s all in the name of comfort and functionality…

Fixing it now

Posted by Nadine

On my mind today: Fixing little things before they become big problems. A bit of background to this one: I called the landlady today to talk with her about a few things that need to get taken care of before they take off for Canada in the middle of May. One of the things was the window in the winter garden that refuses to open. The other windows open two different ways, like this, tilted open at the top:

or like this, wide open from the side:

As an aside, the windows are on the very short list of things I’ll miss about Germany if I ever get to live in the States again. I love, love, love the windows. Windows, rolladen (the outside shades over the windows which are standard fare here), and the Autobahn are just about it on that list of “things I’ll miss.” Anyway, the window in the center of the winter garden would open about an inch, and then wouldn’t budge. After a lengthy, roundabout conversation with the landlady about it, in which she even tried to tell me that it worked when we moved in (as if we’d damaged it somehow since then), I gave up and told her I’d show her husband what I meant on Friday when he shows up with the plumber.

Later, I tried to open the window again with a bit more force. I didn’t want to risk really breaking it before, and maybe not even being able to close it at all if I was ever able to get it open, so I didn’t want to be toooo awfully strong-arm-ish about things, but heck, she’s already decided we’ve broken it, so I figured I had nothing to lose by being a bit more manly with it. Turns out it will open, you just have to fiddle with it, and it will only open wide from the side, and won’t tilt at the top. As far as I can tell, it has exactly the same hardware as the other windows, so it should open from the top as well, which leads me to believe that it really is slightly broken and it’s just not high on the list to get fixed properly, if it’s on the list at all. Continue reading →

Speaking of visual chaos…

Posted by Nadine

Yes, we’re here in the new house near Heidelberg finally, and the move is “over,” sort of. I’ve been busting my butt plowing through the mountains of boxes, and trying to get organized in the new space. “Mountains” is not an exaggeration, by the way. I continue to be amazed at the amount of stuff we had packed into the other house since I’m filling this one up rather quickly as I unpack boxes and arrange furniture, and it’s 1,000 square feet bigger just in living space, with more storage and a garage in the bargain. Where the heck was all of this stuff before? I swear it multiplied in the truck on it’s way here or something!

I’ve also realized a few things during this whole process, such as:

I’m not as bad a housekeeper as I thought. This comes home to me (again) every time we move, because when I set my mind to it, I can clean a house and it will be spotless. When we leave a house to move to another, we kill ourselves cleaning it to within an inch of it’s life, and this last one was no exception. Unfortunately, the houses we move into are never as clean as the ones we leave, and this one followed suit. I’ve spent a good bit of time cleaning years old dirt, lime deposits, etc. out of this house since we arrived, and don’t even get me started on the state of the dishwasher. Suffice it to say that it was a perfect example of why we thoroughly rinse our dishes before they ever get near the dishwasher. 😐 Continue reading →