Three things that I have learned about taking care of flowers by watching Europeans who seem to enjoy simple bouquets more than I have ever seen before:

1. Change the water in the vase every day.

2. Trim the stems frequently.

3. Carry the flowers home upside down to keep the water in the blooms, not the stems.  Does this work?  I don’t know.  If you want to blend in, though, you’d better be carrying those flowers upside down no matter how absolutely awkward you feel doing it.  My mother-in-law even wore her corsage upside down when Martin and I got married (it looked fine, just different, ya know?).

Seeing all the stems poking out of backpacks of several men as they biked home inspired this short poem, though I guess it’s not really for children this time…

FEBRUARY

It is a lovely time of year
with all the flowers in the shops,
and I suspect each married man
will make the florist an annual stop.
He’ll sniff the air and look around,
inhaling all the gorgeous perfumes.
He’s trying hard to remember:
what are his wife’s most favorite blooms?

What about you?  Any tips on how to make those blooms looking fresh extra long?  Or hints for the guy?  What are your favorites?

(Images by Martin for Making This Home)

Back when we started doing this to the original kitchen:

We were left with a couple of these not so pretty edges where the walls were all torn out (either side of me, above me, below me…  It’s everywhere, man!):

The one in the front was hidden with cabinets:

And now we’re tackling the rest of them.  So here’s yet another glimpse of the kitchen as we approach your final inspection (that’s our little dorm fridge in the lower left to give you some bearings)…

The solid drywall was pretty rough after we cut it apart with the saws-all when we opened the kitchen.  To clean it up, we first hand sawed to get the edge smooth.  The silver is edge pieces just like you put on drywall corners in the US.  Martin screwed it in.  Then we mudded it with a sturdier mud than average drywall mud.  We did this because sturdier mud can be applied in thicker coats that dry faster and don’t crack like standard mud.  Here it is drying:

Now this is the part where we ask for your help.  Remember when Joanne showed us her 20 square foot kitchen?  We’d love to share more little spaces like that.  Would you be interested in sharing?  It’s incredibly inspiring to see the cool spaces people have created and hear about how they’ve come to love them.  And no, your kitchen doesn’t have to be THIS small.  We just wanna share the love, the itty-bitty fit in the palm of your hand love that so many of us call home.  I’ll send virtual German chocolate…

When it came time to design a place for our garbage can under the sink, we knew it wouldn’t be simple.  With 10 seperate ways that we had to sort our trash in Germany, we did the best thing we could think of and wandered into a furniture store.  We started examining their kitchen displays (this is also how we learned to build European cabinets with German hardware).  Five dream kitchens later, we found what we needed:

We quickly snapped a photo and headed to the local mom and pop shop to tell them what we wanted.  We’re painfully loyal to the little local guys.  Their goal wasn’t to sell us the most expensive items to make their bosses proud like in the chain store where we were looking, and they were knocking down prices (like 10% off our countertop) since we keep coming back.  They also pointed me to a super affordable German class and other city secrets only a native could know.

Here’s the system that we came up with:

1. The white bucket is for compost and organic matter.  It’s the only thing that ever starts to smell, so we don’t have to take our trash out much.  But this little guy?  Oh he gets emptied All The Time.

2. The gray bin in the back is for trash.  It takes forever to fill that bin.

3. The bin in the front is for general recycling.  If we lived in a small German town, the city wouldn’t accept our recycling because we’re not using yellow bags.  Since we just put our recycling in a huge yellow bin behind our building, we’re sticking with bags of one color, and it happens to be black.  Shhh.

Why So Much Recycling?

Companies in Germany are required to pay set fees for every piece of trash that their products create.  This means that products have as little packaging as possible.  Tape refills don’t come in redundant cardboard boxes.  Sliced cheese doesn’t have unnecessary plastic or paper inserts between each slice.  You get your product; you don’t get excess packaging.  Is that not the coolest way to motivate business to care about the excess they create?

These companies have another option.  They can pay to fund the nation’s recycling program.  I’d say about 99.9% of the things we see can be recycled.  If plastic for packaging can be thinner, products can be put into paper instead of plastic, or anything else, you can bet it happens.  There are no bright blue laundry soap containers here.

We just look for this symbol on our garbage and throw it into our front bin:

4. Well almost everything goes in that bin.  Paper products also have this symbol.  We’re still looking for a basket to collect them above the glass.

5. Glass has this symbol, too.  (You see why I swear you need a PhD to master German garbage disposal?)  You can’t put glass in your recycle bin.  You haul it to the store to get your deposit back or you take it to glass recycling bins around the city to sort the glass by color.  So we have a place to put all of our glass to the left of the dishwasher in the open shelves.

So we’ve just about figured this system out.  I think.  We really didn’t want to clutter our kitchen with all our recycling bins.  Now the only problem is batteries.  I still have a few in my purse that we need to recycle at the hardware store.

(Images by Katie for Making This Home)

Many sheets of sandpaper, wet snowflakes, and rich bites of German chocolate with hazelnuts later, it looks like January has come to an end.  It was a lovely month.  Don’t you think?  One thing that I always love about the beginning of February is the anticipation of warmer, lighter days to come.  I’m tired of the dark afternoons.

But I think I’ll look back to those cold days just once more.  It’s time for a recap of January – the best of the best.

1. Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell, authors of the fantastic book, Celebrate Green!, gave us some really cool green party ideas and tips in this personal interview.  My favorite is the centerpiece suggestion.

2. We got a peek into Joanne’s 20 square foot kitchen.  She offered loads of tips for making any kitchen work–ideas like using vertical space and organizing your space to fit your tasks.

3. Martin and I put together a tutorial on how to restore old furniture.  Our beat up wooden frames served as guinea pigs.

4. Then many of you shared great tips for cutting back on expenses in the comments of the popular post, How We Afford to Live in Europe.

5.  I got all gushy about family heirlooms and taking time to observe the world when I wrote Holding onto the Senses of Touch and Smell.

6. With a little glimpse into our European life, I showed you our water meters that measure water usage to the liter and our two-burner stove, asking if you’d go crazy with the meters like I do or live comfortably with the small oven like we seem to be doing.

7.  I don’t think I’ve ever added any children’s poetry to this list.  As many of you might know, I’m pretty bashful about my poetry.  Most of my family doesn’t even know I write it.  So *somehow* I got the courage to share two with you this month: I Want to Be Bubble Bath Soap and  When My Best Isn’t The Best. Whew!

Last month in my review, several of you pointed out a slip on my part.  I forgot to mention anything about our kitchen in my recap.  (HOW I did that, I have no idea.  It’s impossible to escape the sawdust.)  So let’s end with our kitchen overhaul, shall we?

8.  We ran into our first major problem with the kitchen remodel: the granite countertops didn’t fit at all.  Martin ended up cutting off a portion of one cabinet that we’d custom sized to hold our plates.  The counter was ready to show itself.  The plates are still homeless, as is absolutely everything else while we sand and varnish… sand and varnish…

Why spend money when you don’t have to?  That seems to be our motto around here these days, and Valentine’s Day is no exception.  Here are a couple of Valentines we put together with bits and pieces that were otherwise destined for the trash.  Don’t you just love a bit of repurposing?

The first Valentines we made were just little notes like the ones we all used to exchange in elementary school.  Instead of buying cards, we cut up a cornflakes box.  The text came from an old Business Week I’d been hoarding from Christmas… well except the word “love”, obviously.  That word didn’t seem to come up in my magazine.  A couple markers, stamps, and colored pencils later, and here’s what we got:

(images by Katie for Making This Home)

We try to do a lot of environmentally friendly things at our house by choice.  Now that we’re in Germany, we also kind of have to do them by law.  It seems this country is obsessed with sorting their garbage to the tiniest detail, and no one is afraid to point out when you’ve messed up.

The not speaking German thing I can handle.  Figuring out the garbage system practically takes a PhD.  Thankfully, I think I might graduate thanks to my wonderful eves dropping skills.  Living in the city makes garbage sorting So Much Easier than small town life.  I don’t have to worry about which bins get picked up every two weeks or four weeks or if I used the right color of bag.  Yes, the proper bag makes a HUGE difference.  In the city, I just go out to the back of the building with my recycling piles or carry them to the drop off bins any time I need.

You ready for the routine?  I’ll be handing out diplomas at the end…

Step 1.    Return plastic bottles and glass bottles and yogurt jars to drink stores to get your deposit back.  This process is all fine and dandy until the clerk hands one of  your bottles back to you and says “nein” no. I have no idea how I finally figured out the solution.  I think it’s because I’m not all that great with rejection.  So after the third time my Bio-nade bottles were rejected by the chain grocer and I had to walk home with groceries AND empty bottles, I determined that if they don’t sell that product, they don’t take back the bottle.  You have to walk back home with it and remember where the heck you got the stupid thing so you can get your 15 cents.

Step 2.    Recycle all remaining glass by color in three bins like these.  Martin says I’m a dork, but I just loved the contrast of this picture I snapped while we were exploring in November.  I’ve been dying to share it with you ever since.

Step 3.    Toss all paper and cardboard in the blue bin behind your building.  Easy peasy.

Step 4.    Plug your nose and get ready to move.  You’ve got to put your food scraps, plant bits, and other yuckies in the compost bin also nicely behind the building.  You won’t miss it – it’s got all the fruit flies and stink around it.  Thankfully, our windows are nowhere near this bin.

Step 5.    Put every bit of packaging – and I mean EVERY bit – in the huge yellow bins if it has the little green “dot”, the symbol for recycling.  Everything from cheese wrappers to shampoo bottles and old compost bins go here because I haven’t found a piece of packaging that doesn’t have this dot.

Step 6.    Put the styrofoam… Oh wait.  There is no styrofoam.  That stuff takes millions of years to break down, and I really like living somewhere where I don’t have to ask the waitress to NOT give me a styrofoam container for my leftovers.

Step 7. This list doesn’t end, does it? Hunt down a clothes recycling bin for all fabric scraps, clothes, and shoes.  They’re around.  No idea where I found this one:

Step 8.    I don’t know what to do with metal in Berlin yet, but in the small town, a funny little man drove a cart around town ringing a bell.  He took all your metal scraps… I mean ALL.  Old pots, wires, beat up jewelry…

Step 9.    Toss your batteries into your coat pocket or purse so you can return them to the hardware store.  (I’m sure you can recycle them at other places, but we practically live at the hardware store after quiet hours every week.)  At our house, we practically need a whole other line item that says:  remember to take those AA batteries OUT of your pockets at the hardware store.  I’m sure none of you would ever forget, huh?  Talk about irritating.

Step 10.    Put everything else in the black bin… which, you know, is like NOTHING since you already recycled everything.  You’ve never seen a smaller garbage can.

It all sounds pretty easy, right?  (!!)

Now if you’re doing the math like we were… that much sorting could easily fill our entire kitchen by itself with all those bins.  So we wasted no time brainstorming a solution for how we could fit upwards of a hundred separate recycling spaces in our kitchen.  And that challenge, my friends, is a post for another day.  Enough trash talk.  I’m spent.

In the meantime, we’d love some tips on how you manage your recycling and trash.  For those of you who aren’t recycling, well maybe just don’t tell me.  Okay?  I’m still working on that degree.

Hungry for more?  Here’s how we organized our kitchen recycling center to accommodate everything.  And if you need more Germany survival tips, check out our Expat Guide.