3 Reasons I’m Thinking This May Take a While

I’d been bursting at the seams with the thought of sharing the latest updates of our kitchen rebuild with you.  The 36 workable square feet of space looked like they were going to work without a hitch.  Or at least that’s what we thought.  There’s just one tinsy tiny problem: 

We’re not in the United States anymore.  It’s kinda Greek to me.

 

Dilemma One

For us, the hardest thing about living in a new country isn’t the language, the laws, or the food.  It’s figuring out where to get the things we need just to function day to day.  Where do you shop for lumber in a new country?  How about a decent table saw or file?  Heck, exactly which brands are decent?

In the US, if I needed a bucket of wood putty, I knew exactly where to go.  I generally knew where to find it in the store.  And I also knew exactly what my preferred wood putty container Iooked like.  You could probably say the same about any product you buy from yogurt and plastic bins to a ream of paper.  

Here, I didn’t know where to go for any of that.  I didn’t even know if they used wood putty.  A task that would have taken ten minutes in the US suddenly began taking an ENTIRE DAY in Germany.  It was very frustrating to pause at the end of the day and think about what we’d accomplished.  There have been so many days when all we can ever say is:  I bought the little ___ we needed.

 

Dilemma Two

It isn’t like the US where everyone either

  1. has a huge pickup, SUV, or trailer
  2. knows of somebody who does.  (Remember, gas costs around $9/gallon here.  Trucks aren’t very efficient.)  

A lot of people get around without cars here, and the people who do drive cars have really small ones.  No minivans, SUVs, big Subarus.  So then we had to figure out:  how could we get lumber and tools home once we find a store?  I have only seen one pickup in Europe, though I have seen plenty of these parked and stuffed with material at the lumberyard:

 

With the huge sheets of wood that we’re bringing home, we actually had to rent a big moving van like a U-Haul.  I never thought I’d be saying that.

 

Dilemma Three

We’re young.  We’re the computer generation.  And the likelihood of us turning on the chop saw at 9:00 at night is a whole lot more likely than 9:00 in the morning.  Except we can’t.  

Germany has strict laws about when you’re allowed to make unnecessary noise.  Unnecessary noise includes: vacuming, mowing your lawn, listening to loud music, and running your dishwasher in apartment complexes.  It’s kind of like college dorms except that everyone actually follows the rules.  They aren’t afraid to knock on your door to remind you of the rules, either.

So we are allowed to run power tools from 9:00 to 1:00, then 3:00 to 5:00 six days a week.  We have 36 hours a week to organize all the drilling and hammering that we need to do.  The good thing is that everyone else also has 36 hours to bang around, too.  If I want to watch a movie at night, I can without having to pause for loud noises – you know, assuming I will have a home to relax in one day.

Results?

So after several weeks of work, all I have to show you is this one little picture of Martin getting ready to test fit cabinet number one.

cabinet-1

 

(Photographs from jmlyn23 and Making This Home.)