Home Progress

We finally managed to fix the table that has been lying upside down on the floor for weeks. The feet are new and putting everything back together took many hours. This table was our table in the Netherlands but had been in Kütahya (the old house that I mentioned a while back) for more than 20 years, besides the middle part which was in our attic, nice to have it all back together again.

The chairs are all mismatched vintage beauties, the house is pretty modern so it is nice to have some warm and playful furniture. Slowly the house is becoming a home, and with the table, the odd large L-shaped kitchen makes much more sense. We also went to IKEA for some new beds, still working on those!

We also made good progress on the atelier. Just moving a home is a lot of work but for us it is the ateliers that are the biggest task, both are fully packed, and we still are on the first!! But we are getting there.

Every time we go we fill up the car till full capacity the house then becomes a mess which we then clear up. It all takes a lot of time and effort but in the end, we will hopefully have a great working space!

The sewing side is looking good, but there is still loads of fabric to move!

Kitchen Update

I finally got a little visible progress in the kitchen.

Removing the protective stickers already helped a lot.

The table is another project that I hope to finish this week. It is a gorgeous table which was our table in the Netherlands but it has been in the house in Kütahya for 22 years to it got some water damage. You'll see soon how that turns out.

I bought a special tile paint, it shines like tile and keeps the texture.

Ahhhh so much better, wish I had cleared things up before taking the photo but I had been painting for 4+ hours by then and just wanted to go home. The kitchen feels much more like it belongs to us. The shiny handles wouldn't be our choice either but we can live with those :) In the future we want to move the kitchen to a room that for now will be our office, a closed kitchen will be more practical with the dogs, but that is a big (expensive) change that will have to wait some years. The kitchen is also not designed very practical, I think there is like 8-9 meters between the fridge and the stove :D The kitchen is the only place we are not happy with of the house, but it is huge so that makes it up quite a bit.

Progress, Progress

It has been quiet on our blog, things have been hectic with the moving. It doesn't helps that the houses are not in the same city, everything takes a bit more time, but slowly we are making progress. In the meantime I did manage to finish these three chairs of which I had shown the first a while back.

As for the house, a big ugly hole is now filled with an induction cooking plate. The tiles I'm planning to paint tomorrow, I have washed them and applying painters tape, so I'm ready to go and get rid of these busy tiles.

In our basement we made a storage room for all our big products, we built those metal storage shelves and have been filling up our car every trip, I have been carrying around so much lately that I think I sport about as much as a fitness fanatic :D too bad that I'm not losing any weight!

We got a warm water heater, warm water is always handy, and the bathrooms are slowly getting cleaner too :)

The biggest adventure as of late was getting an electricity line.

There was, of course, electricity at the house but the previous owner did not go through the hassle to have the electricity go from industrial (which is used while building a home) to regular. It is costly and an absolute bureaucracy and all-around pain.

On Monday our electrician called that everything would be at the house the next morning at 9 am. To my surprise when I got there, half of it was indeed there (I expected everything to be late). The electrician and half of the materials had arrived and about 15 minutes later a tiny excavator arrived to dig a ditch for the electricity line. 2 seconds later it stopped working. It looked antique and after 1 hour and 15 minutes of watering, oiling and staring at it they gave up and it went away and another one was called.

At just after 11 so 2 hours in, a second excavator started.

And hit a water line, right away...even though we had asked the water company where the line was, but turned out that we were not correctly informed.

Everywhere became muddy but I told the excavator guy to continue (they are paid per hour and the clock was ticking). Knowing that the water company wouldn't come straight away to fix the pipe.

Lovely waterworks in the meantime.

Although a bit messy and muddy things went along.

While the electrician laid down the line, sand and such I wanted the excavator to do some other work while waiting, again time was ticking and I wanted to make good use of it, but very soon he got a flat tire :D

And my shoes were feeling odd, when I looked down I saw that they got very wide as they were completely falling apart, I hadn't used them for a while and the glue had dried, at the end of the day I hardly had any shoes on, it was funny but very inconvenient :D

After almost 2 hours, at 1:15 right after lunch the water company arrived. The favorite job of all Turks is to watch 1 person work while at least 4 other watch how he works :) But things get eventually done, you just have to be chill (it took us a while to get used to this utter mess but that is how life is here). And if you show impatience or annoyance, it will just take longer.

The excavator guy arrived shortly after that with his fixed tire, he was gone for two hours (not on my bill) and it actually turned out in my favor as he normally would have to wait for the water company, so a lucky break for us.

The road was at the end of the day better than it was before, everything got done, it took longer than anticipated but all is well that ends well. It will take about 2 months (!!) for all the paper work to be done to get the electricity in my name, crazy.