Diary of moving: week one

As of today I’ll be reporting about my upcoming moval and the redecoration that has to be done at my new flat. And as of today I’ll switch to writing in English so some of my international readers won’t be left out anymore. There haven’t been any complaints but as I was reading Cem’s bright blog over at cemonko.com it came to that I’m locking out most of the people I deal with everyday.

Moving house to my new home next to our office is coming close as thankfully some helpful hands and me - that’s most parts of my family and some good friends - are almost done with redecorating my new home and I have to say I’m enjoying this part of the moval quite much: Building and redecorating the flat the way I want it to be and learning how to do things like trimming, tiling and so on by watching the hands of my father and my uncle. I really have to send my thanks to their direction as they’re really doing most of the hard work - but I really enjoy watching and learning how to do this stuff! I hope that one day I can show this to my children, too.

Removal of the kitchen’s old lino floor, trimming parts of the kitchen’s walls and detecting 3 layers of old wallpaper that had to be removed piece for piece. Removing the old wall tiles really was hard work and my wrists still hurt.

On the other hand this is fun and different to the everyday “virtual work” about designing websites and managing disobedient servers and clients (I’m talking about the technical counterpart of course. You know, actually this is the kind of work whose outcome really is something you can see and touch and either you do it right or your tiles are falling from the wall again.

I guess, if I had to reconsider what I’m doing for a living in my next life (even though I don’t believe in such things) I’d like to be a craftsperson or someone on a job-site. Perhaps this is why I like the virtual world so much - the possibility of creating new worlds and things “at your fingertips”. But when it comes to construction and things these highly sophisticated worlds are far away and don’t matter when you’re holding the power drill while the guy next to you is hammering his heart out to get these tiles from the wall. Usually more the sort of “clean guy” that doesn’t like to get his hands dirty I realize this is different when it comes to things that really happen to have an impact in reality. Like redecorating your own flat and scratching old wallpapers. It has to be done. It’s hard work but different in the end - you feel like you really did some useful work.

When it comes to redecoration and construction I really can see what Tim Allen is talking about on Home Improvement.

What we’re up to next:

• Outpouring the kitchen’s floor so we can start tiling
• Exchanging all outlets and switches to new ones (I got some good ones from Berker)
• Tiling the bathroom (classic 15×15 white tiles on the wall and large white ones on the floor)
• Cleaning the sleeping room’s floor carpet (hopefully our office’s cleaning company can do that)
• Assembling the built-in kitchen (this is going to take another day)
• Buying new stuff (esp. kitchen tools and lighting)
• Cleaning the “sunshine all day long” patio - going to use a pressure washer for that

I hope I can post some pictures soon!