Advent Sundays, wallpaper and rapid progress, part 1

In my last post I went far back into past, showing pictures of the history of our house. I think at some point I'd like to put together some sort of "then and now" series, using the old photographs and putting them next to a current one taken in the exact same spot. For now though, here's what happened in the last month or so since my last entry.

First of all, the lovely Marcel and his equally fantastic dad filled the little opencast mine we had going right in the middle of the house.
A bit of rebar

 Some concrete

 Freshly mixed, of course.

 And into the hole it goes!

What a transformation! It starts off as merely a hole in the ground...

...first gets filled with a thick layer of sand and some polystyrene insulation material.

 Plastic foil.












Then the first layer of concrete, the rebar and then...

Ta-daa! A nice, smooth, even layer of perfect
concrete and the "hole" is no more!

 Woo-hoo, wallpapering! Everybody's favourite work. Long, unwieldy strips of paper that cling to everything but the wall they're supposed to stick to. And bucketloads of gloop. What's not to love? :)

A wallpaper selfie ;)

A well-earned tea break, courtesy of Marcel's mum. Home-made Christmas biscuits, cheese sandwiches, tea and candles. Happy 2nd of Advent!

With our stomachs full of Christmas tea and biscuits we were able to quickly finish wallpapering:

The kitchen looks completely different now. Almost ready! More to follow. For now I really should go to bed. Off to see The Hobbit tomorrow! :)

A quick trip back in time

Now that the work on our new home is progressing quite nicely I think it's time to look back over the history of the building. Built well over a hundred years ago (we don't know exactly when, sometime between 1870 and 1890), it was originally a working farm. Now all that's left of the original farm is the main building, surrounded by a huge garden, a couple of sheds and around half a dozen cats of various sizes and degrees of fluffiness. I think I may have mentioned in my first post that we are moving into the original living quarters, while my boyfriend's parents now live in the part of the house that used to be the stables before they converted it back in the '70s.

Just as a reminder, this is the house the way it looked last summer. Bit less green and a lot more yellows/oranges/browns right now...The back (or front, depends how you look at it) entry, our front door and the kitchen and bedroom window.

 The same view of the house, this time in the 1960s. The window on the corner at the back is our future bedroom window.

 The old front door and the kitchen window, this time in the late 1930s. The house was being used as a small post office at this time, hence the sign by the door. We want to put a bench back in that space below the window. Right now, there's a flowerbed running along the side of the house.

The house in the 1940s. Our front door is clearly visible, but the buildings to the right don't exist any more. The barn at the back has been converted into 3 garages/storage spaces/ tool sheds.

 In the vegetable garden, ca. 1965. I'd love to revive the vegetable garden! This might be a nice project for next year...

 Same spot, but in the 1930s.

 The farm actually had a name, "Hossenhof".

I don't actually know when exactly this was painted, but it was sometime in the '50s. The building on the far left is the garage, the green building doesn't exist any more. And of course the stables in the main building have now been converted to a nice, cosy, huge living room! :)

 An aerial view of the house, 1960s. Only the main building and the barn behind it still stand. The buildings to the left and the right have long since disappeared. (I really, really want that vegetable garden back!)

The old road in the 1950s. There are still cows in that field on the left, and the one on the right is still in the same place, too. But ever since the new road on the other side of the house was built this road is used more or less only by residents.


So that was my quick trip down memory lane. I find the history of the building fascinating! We are planning to frame these photographs and hang them up on our kitchen wall once we move in, to create a link between the old and the new. Just like the kitchen floor and the old oven.

Getting there, part 2: a wee update

Updates are like buses, you wait forever and then two turn up at once... I've finally managed to convert the RAW images from last weekend that had been lurking on a USB stick into usable .jpg images. As you will see, considerable progress has been made. My only regret is that while my knees may be black and blue from prolonged contact with the tiled kitchen floor, said floor doesn't appear to be any cleaner than before. I THINK it is a couple of shades lighter than it was before I attacked it with a scrubbing brush and hot water (and yes, an old tootbrush as well!), but that may just be wishful thinking.

 Someday soon there will be a tile floor here. For now, there's a dark, scary hole we must walk past every time we need to go to the bathroom. Cold and scary in the middle of the night, mildly annoying during the day.

But it will be our connection between the kitchen and the living room. The bathroom's off to the right, living room to the left. For now it is known as "Das Loch" ("the hole" in German), because essentially, that's what it is, a dark, scary hole in the middle of the house. Maybe even a black hole, who knows? ;)

 The lovely Marcel in action! Who doesn't love wallpapering a ceiling?

The wallpaper completely transforms the room.

It creates a much more "finished" atmosphere. We also put the fridge up as well, to get a feel for the dimensions.

 See my nice, shiny, clean floor?

This is one of the doorknobs I bought about two years ago to be used on an IKEA chest I had painted white and put in the hall. I wanted to see how it looked in our kitchen. :)

 And finally, today I got these pictures. Woo-hoo, we've got a kitchen! Sort of.

 The worktop's going to change. We want a wooden one instead of the grey. And of course the manky old tiles are going to be covered by the lovely blue tiles in the bottom left corner.

 These tiles.

 One huge step closer to a usable kitchen!