Watching the Water Meter & Forgetting to Breathe

As requested, I’m back with some more of the nitty gritty about our kitchen remodel and what the heck we’ve got in here.  Today?  These odd-ball fellas above our faucet:

water-valves

Those ugly things are our water meters.  One measures hot; one measures cold.  We also have another pair in the bathroom to measure our water usage in there, too.

Now when I came to Germany, these little suckers had to be the most stressful thing in our original kitchen.  I could sort of handle the lack of counters, the non-existant storage, and the oven that leaked heat so that I needed a hotpad to open the fridge.  But I could NOT handle doing dishes right next to those meters.  What girl could?  Those water meters are showing my consumption to the liter.  The LITER!   (That’s 4.2 cups for those of you not freaking out yet.)

Do you have any idea what it’s like to think of your shower in terms of liters?  It’s in and out, baby.  No hot, relaxing morning wake ups.  I began drinking coffee.

The worst part is that I’ve read about American families in Germany who think they’re being frugal only to get a 1,000 euro bill ($1,300) for the extra water and heat they were consuming above the building’s average.  You pay a flat fee toward your water and electricity in Germany each month.  At the end of the year, your meters are read, and it is determined if you owe more or get money back.

I consider myself fairly conservative  about our resources (“hippy” my brother would say) compared to most Americans, but I’m still an American.  I’m used to gas costing less than $3 a gallon (it’s around $9 here), houses being huge, and every other enormous thing that comes with the American Dream… and one of those is certainly not a water meter that measures anything under 10,000 gallons.
(Image by Katie for Making This Home)