The price of adventure...

So, to continue the story, let's see where were we?  That's right, we dragged our sorry hides to our new apartment, armed with everything we could possibly carry with us, and here is a little snapshot of all of the little friends that were poking out of holes to see who was brazen enough to enter their domain:

As I said earlier, apartments in Germany are typically stripped bare and paraded to the world in all of it's glory.  No lights, no closets, no cabinets, no shelves, no sink, no oven, no nuthin (except the bathroom sink, toilet, etc, but I wanted to use the coloqual "nuthin" for dramatic effect).  But, the place really looked nice and very spacious.  Almost too nice. 

Our neighbor upstairs set up some matrasess for the kids for us, and Simone, in the ward, brought us a huge box of toys.  The kids were in baré-house-heaven, which was good because we would turn out to be pretty neglectful paprents for the next stretch of time.   But we were home, the weather was nice, and things were looking doeable, unitl...  (dun dun dunnnnnnnnn)



the kitchen arrived.  Whoa, I was definitely overwhelmed.  Boxes upon boxes started settling in hallways and stacked into corners.  I have never needed to assemble a kitchen.  Never really wanted to, but here it was nonetheless.  The instructions were in about 20 languages, which means that they were pretty insufficient in 20 languages, and the guy delivering it made some comments about how he never delivered one without being hired to install it.  Well, we got in our newly purchased sleeping bags on our newly acquired couch, and tried to sleep of the intimidation, knowing that a few people from the ward were going to come and help us out the next day.

Well I was so nervous about them coming that I got up at 6 am the next day (which was midnight in Michigan time) and tried to prepare.  There was no way that I could prepare for what was about to happen...

People just kept coming.  HaJü came and put a bucket of paint stuff on the floor and immediately started painting, Simone came and took the kids to her house and dropped off some food, the Baumanns, the Eglys, Sara, Gerphil, Harold all came in a dizzying whirlwind of activity and started doing stuff.  Pretty soon there were at least 3 men in the kitchen at all times trying to circumvent the instructions, mad dashes to OBI (home depot equivalent), paint flying, tape taping, food being consumed, and crazy German words that I didn't even know existed being thrown around like nobodys business.  It was a spectacular chaos.  Finally, when the last saint left, I was left with my head swimming with newly acquired vocabulary and a crazy house that was at least on the way to being done. 

This was me the next week, after cutting a hole in the counter for the stove top.  You can see what had been done, and how crazy everything was.  HaJü came back to help me with some more painting and the plumbing, and we were able to crank out a workable, if uncomplete, kitchen by the end of the next week.  (As a side not, we spent most of the days during the week working on getting a visa, tax number, health insurance, cell phones, internet, cars, furniture, etc so I really only had a few hours a day and some time at night to get this done.)

Here's what it looked like in what I call "the interum"

We got a ton of free furniture from Mario and Harold, but painting meant that we had to move it a lot before even using it.  In the upper left, you might have noticed all of the streaks on the wall: in most german apartments there is a layer of textured wallpaper that you paint on.  So, as you paint, sometimes the wallpaper soaks through and looks really dark and blotchy.  Because of this, you really have no idea what it's all going to look like until it dries, which makes it hard to judge whether a second coat is needed or not.  Anyway, I started work and work on the house became a strictly evening affair.  The Egly's came over for another Saturday, and we hung the cabinets.  So I still have some things to do like hang the lights (it stays light until around 10, so we haven't really needed more than the bathroom light and a floor lamp yet, so it's been low on the priority list) and I have to do the duct work for the vent over the stove and then a hundred other little things like curtains and such, but we are pretty much up and running.  Behold, our abode: