War is Dumb, But We Can Do Something

Holey Moley! People, you are so awesome! So many of you have POURED into my inboxes to show these amazing families support, love, and help. We've spent the weekend getting the apartment upstairs ready to be lived in (and still have a little to do.) The good news is that I've heard that the 2 women and 5 children heading to us are out of Ukraine safely! I think they spent last night in Moldova. We hope to meet them here, in our home, within the next few days! (We bought this house 1.5 years ago and were planning on eventually renovating the upstairs as a holiday short term rental apartment... Plans change!)

A little background information: We met Igor in 2001, when we were all working at a summer church camp. Camp Lutherlyn Igor was the "other" foreign exchange staff member that year. (You can imagine the trouble Christoph and Igor got into!) They bonded immediately and we all hung out whenever we could. Well, you know how it ended with Christoph and me, but we also have been fortunate to stay in touch with Igor ever since.

He attended our wedding reception in Germany in 2005, we traveled to Ukriaine in 2006 for a beautiful vacation together with him, and he came to visit us here in Hannover in 2017 (I think?) He wanted to come later with his wife Julie, but Covid cancelled those plans.

Well, the lives of all Ukrainians have turned upside down. Igor's remaining in Ukraine to continue his work as a neurosurgeon in Dnipro. (He's upgraded since washing dishes in a dining hall in 2001!) He keeps us informed enough to know that there are so many soldiers to save! He's fighting to keep his fellow men alive.

Meanwhile, his wife and three children (ages 10,12, and 1) are heading our way by car. They've been traveling already for days and it will take another couple for them to get here. In addition, Igor sent his best friend and her 2 children (ages 17 and 11) too. He trusts us with his family and it's a position that we don't take lightly. We don't know these women or their children yet, but we feel in our deepest hearts that it is our calling right now to care for them, and help get them started on a new life where they feel safe and loved.

Similarly, Igor's sister, Elena, has fled Ukraine. She worked at Lutherlyn with us too... and is heading to safety to other family members with her 2 kids. We will support her in whatever ways we can.

It's a crazy time. It feels weird to sit in the sun, drink a coffee, look at our blooming daffodils, and marvel at the spring, when I know that it's such a hell for others not-so faraway. I guess we all feel this a bit. That's what makes us loving, wonderful humans.

I'll wrap up this longest-facebook-post-ever by simply saying THANK YOU again.

If you feel called to donate to these three families, here's a link to a paypal account I've set up. 100% of these donations will go to Ukrainians in need, specifically the three women and their children that I've just written about. Anything extra will go to Igor and his work in the Dnipro hospital.

https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8HMlj9ixgo

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She's 11- My, how time flies!

This used to be an "Annie" blog, basically... Well, at least for a few years it was. Now, instagram and facebook get more of my attention than this blog, but I do enjoy it as a journal of our family life. So here we are. Annie turned 11 last week and I want to honor her with a post. 

She's truly the sweetest person I know. Since her babyhood, she has a strong sense of empathy, and that has not gone away. Now that she's older, she uses it to mediate disagreements between buddies in middle school, chooses to be the friend to those without one, and is extremely helpful to her family. She has been a trooper this past year, as we've gone through a big renovation and move. She barely flinches when she hears that she has to sleep on a couch somewhere or that there's no hot water for a night. She welcomes people into her home, space, and heart without skipping a beat, but is smart enough to avoid people who aren't life-giving. 

At 11, Annie is growing independence. She goes to the neighbor's horse stables alone once or twice a week on her bike or scooter to nuzzle her four-legged friends or jump in on a horse training. She enjoys things like helping with construction or cooking simple meals for us. She has recently started using the public transportation alone in Hannover from her dad's work to school on a few mornings when we didn't drive in together. She's developing good routines (with a bit of help) to make sure her schoolwork is done and she's meeting deadlines. Annie is a perfectionist, which slows her down, but we're working on letting go a bit, to know when "just okay" is good enough. 

Annie loves playing the guitar and has recently switched to a new guitar teacher. After 2 years of missed regular guitar lessons due to the Covid-pandemic, it's such a delight to hear her play every day again while she practices. Her favorite 6th grade class is Drama and she's a great natural actor. She's also a very good natural dancer, though she doesn't have any formal training. She often relaxes by dancing in her room. She also relaxes by painting "paint-by-number" pictures or reading. 

We're so proud of our girl. She's hardly a girl anymore- more of a young lady. It's fun to watch her blossom and bloom. 

A Good Old Fashioned Whine

 Well, it all went so seamlessly for so long. . . Maybe that's why the past two week's worth of bad news updates have been so upsetting and tiring. 

Yes, the window broke. And the foundation needed to be rebuilt. Yes, the first window for the bathroom was too big (but hey- it got used for the new room in the basement!) But this week has trumped it all. 

The guest room was looking so, so good last weekend. We had furniture. We had heat. We even had some decorations. 

But suddenly, we heard some popping sounds and realized that the tiles were popping loose! We thought it was bags of faulty glue and invited the glue company to come and inspect the situation. Turns out- the guy we hired to lay the tiles didn't quite know what he was doing and didn't follow all the protocols. And there were consequences. Ugh. (For the record, we don't think he did it on purpose- I think he was just an amateur posing as an expert.) Dangit. 

So, the room that looked like this 2 weeks ago: 

Now looks like this: 

It's sad and defeating and just plain old depressing. We have a hard 2 weeks ahead of us. I'm not sure who reads this, but please send us and this house a prayer and some good vibes. We need all the help we can get with move-in date just 4 weeks away! 

Plan of (Furnishing) Attack

 My strategy with furnishing this big old house is simple: 

* Use what we have! *

We do currently have a whole house full of furniture, fixtures, and decorations. Plus, this house came with a lot of old furniture. Is ANY of it wonderful or amazing? No, not really. But it's good enough and functional. 

I'm also doing a lot of scrapping furniture off of friends and family. Suddenly, now that people know that we're looking for things, colleagues are happy to offer me their spare couches or guest beds for a good price. I'm also becoming an expert at ebay and the classified ads online. We've made lots of "friends" this way during the shut-down. 

Of course, we DO have to buy some new things, but in every room, I'm insisting on mixing old with new so that there isn't that "IKEA Showroom" feeling (which I do love, but don't want here...) when you walk in the room. I want the feeling of this house to be comfortable and lived in. I want there to be little treasures everywhere you look, even if sometimes the reaction is "Oh, well, that's interesting..." My goal is that those moments bring bits of contentment or joy. 

Take this bathroom in the basement. This is in our guest suite, and this particular room used to be a chicken coop! 

The tiles on the floor and wall are new. The sink is new from a local construction store and the lights will come from there too. But the mirror is from this house- probably from the 1960s and was installed upstairs in the apartment. The shelf has a date stamped onto it: August 24, 1950. I don't remember where this was before in this house, probably in the "red bathroom" that is now a pantry closet.  I'm even using little decorations from this house, such as a beautiful brass tray and a little vase which I filled with flowers from the yard that I found in a box in the basement.  Christoph will make the windowsills and shelves from some beautiful scrap wood that he found in the shed. Yes. It's a new room. But it has a built-in, layered feeling (even if the whole thing, including the shower, is only about 2 square meters!) 

Today, we're picking up a lot of things from IKEA. We've finally gotten to a point that we can finish furnishing this downstairs bedroom. Now, in our Hannover house, we do have a spare double bed that we use as a guest bed. But that's my one caveat to "use what you have." We only use what we have... when it suits this house and our needs here. We're trying NOT to bring furniture into this space that we know we'll try to replace within a year or two (with a few exceptions...) I don't want a double bed in this guest suite AND the bed needs to have some additional functions such as a built in dresser and headboard. So, for this, we will splurge on a new set up. The secret, then, is to make sure that other elements in the room are not brand new. For example, I plan on using a vintage quilt as a bedspread, and I'm getting an adorable restored hutch from a friend who is moving that will function as a breakfast bar/ additional storage. 

It's exciting to see that my plan is working so far. This is the first space that is becoming furnished and it's fun to see that the ideas in my head are working (even better than I hoped!) in real life. 

And now, just because I'm proud of this, here's a picture of the wall I wallpapered yesterday. It's my first time trying wallpaper and I'm very pleased with how it turned out. 

I can't wait to show you the final room, though it'll be a week or two before I've collected all of the furniture I plan on using here... 

Yay! It's finally getting prettier instead of uglier!

 So, the way it went was: 

- Let's buy a house but keep the character, right? Right! 

- This one is perfect. We can keep most of it. Even a lot of the furniture! Score! 

- Oh, the plumbing should be re-done? 

- Oh, now that the walls are open we can see how old the electricity is. Darn. Better do that too. 

- Well, now that all the walls are down, let's change EVERYTHING! 

(enter the sound of money flapping in the wind as it rushes away...) 

So, we paid a good penny for a house, then completely destroyed a lot of what we loved so much about it. 

And now we're spending another good penny and plenty of time putting that character back in. . . 

Maybe that wasn't our plan, but it's how it's gone, and we're fine with it. In the end, we'll know every inch of this house and we can trust that it will serve us well while we are it's stewards. And what would have been a nice enough house on an awesome piece of property will now be a really awesome house on a really awesome piece of property!  

FINALLY, after months of ripping things out and putting boring foundations back in, we are getting to the pretty part that I love! Most of the new windows are in. The walls are all re-plastered and built back up. And now we get to see some tile being installed, including our kitchen backsplash, some bathroom walls, and soon, the floors! 

Be still my heart! This house is gonna be so good! 

2 Steps Forward, 1 Step Back

 Isn't that how a major renovation is supposed to go? 

We've been really lucky to have a lot of steps forward, but this week, a few steps back have emerged... The roofer won't come until mid-spring (instead of late-winter, as we planned on.) The tiles we ordered for the entire floor of our living space are stuck in Italy with Covid-19. (We didn't buy fancy or expensive tiles, though it's fun to say that our "Italian tiles are stuck in Italy!") And this week, after the deep freeze of last week, we realized that one of our freshly-laid pipes busted in our sunroom, causing a bit of a plumbing emergency. This also made us shut off the heat. And dig up the freshly poured concrete in the sunroom. 

I mean, when the plumber is wearing a stethoscope, that's never a good sign, right? 

Yikes. 

Fortunately, after 3 hours of individually checking the stock rooms of EVERY SINGLE Toom (Home-Depot-style) store in northern Germany, I found 2 that had enough of our tile to get us collectively enough for our project. So, Christoph has been driving around like a crazy person, picking up TONS of tile, but now we have it. 

The floor/pipes are being fixed. 

We accept the fact that we probably won't move into our house over Spring Break, like we hoped to, but that's okay... We have a time buffer now from our current rental contract. 

Life goes on. It's gonna be okay. 

But let's go ahead and move forward, shall we? I sure hope our luck didn't wear out, because we still need lots of it! 

Brrrr. It feels like we're back in Alaska!

It feels like we're back in Alaska this week for a number of reasons. 

Reason 1: We got proper winter weather! Over the weekend it snowed about a foot of snow and it's remained in the negative temperatures all week, which means that the snow has stayed! This has also brought crisp, beautiful, sunny days which our Vitamin D deficient bodies are so happy about! 

Reason 2: We're living in a construction site. The new house is coming along, slowly but surely. The walls are being plastered and tiles have been ordered and delivered. There is a constant layer of grayish-white dust everywhere all the time, which dries out your skin. No matter whether we're at the new house or the old one, things are a mess, as we sort, box and store. The old house is slowly emptying out as I go through Annie's childhood books and toys and donate them to friends and colleagues. The trash can is filling up over and over again with bits and bobs that aren't worth moving to the new house. And we're starting to transport important parts of our life to the new house (though it's far from it's move-in date!) .... which leads me to: 

Reason 3: Hans is here this week, which means that there is a powerhouse behind us to be productive. The guy has so much determination and energy- it's inspiring (and so helpful!) Christoph took a week of vacation and Annie and I are off for Winter Holiday for the week. Of course, we had big plans of moving... and a little cold weather won't stop us. This week, we had planned on moving the chickens to the new house, which means dismantling the chicken coop from our current house, which we built only about 9 months ago, while in Corona Quarantine...

... setting up the chickens in a temporary shelter in the basement. (None of us are sure yet if this was a good idea or not. On one hand, they're warmer than they would be if they were outside. However, even though I prepared the room for it, it's a mess and there are bits of straw everywhere- not just in the room that they're housed in.) They seem happy enough, but not joyous. Maybe they feel that they've been sent to prison. I'm not sure. In any case, they're still laying eggs, so that's a good sign. 

And now we've spent the last two days at the new house, resurrecting the chicken coop, with a few modifications. The roof from the first one, which was recycled from a neighbor's patio, didn't survive the dismantling in -15 degrees C. So, we had to buy new roofing material. Everything else, though, is recycled from the first coop and/or from the demo of the new house. So, I'm proud about that. The new coop is almost the same design, but slightly bigger so that I can add another couple of birds this spring. We also have to make it a bit more predator-proof since there are tons of weasels, raccoons, foxes and even wolves roaming in the countryside around our new house. 

So that's our Alaskan Week in Germany.... Cold toes, cold hands, hard work, sore muscles, but bright skies, lots of satisfaction, and the gifts of beautiful views and perfect snowflakes.