REVIEW: Renovating & Moving 2010, Part II

Looking back i must admit that we made some wrong decisions over the years. We should have been frugal instead of spending all our money on moving, renovating and buying new furniture. We should have started small and then improved step by step. We should have stayed in our first appartment. We should have saved every penny in order to afford our own place one day, instead of paying those high amounts of rent.
We wasted so much money and it almost feels as if the last six years have never existed and we have to start from scratch. I think we are so much wiser now and would make it all different if we could. But of course we can't change the past and have to make the best of our current situation. We still pay too much rent for way too little space, our appartment is crooked and the street noise is annoying. We love this appartment but deep inside we wish we could move away, again...

Anyhow, the painters were busy and it got better from day to day. Sleeping on the sofa wasn't comfortable at all and finishing the bedroom had top priority. Two or three days later we could set up our bed and closet and wardrobe and unpack our clothes.

In November we bought this beauty:

The bathroom:

The kitchen:

A football-sized hole "happened" while scraping the wallpaper

Who likes flatpacks??

The hallway:

Right after we thought everything was fine and almost finished the electrician told us he had to renew the electrics completely, as it was too old and too dangerous. Um, alright, go ahead.
And so he destroyed the freshly renovated kitchen and hallway walls. Great-y!

The livingroom:

The microwave was our best friend during that period ( aside from the renovators)

A few food impressions:

Let me end this review with a snapshot of how we spent the evenings. Eating and watching "TV" on my laptop.

As long as we got each other ... we can take anything that comes our way...
Remember the "Growing Pains" song? As a child i simply liked the tune but now as an adult i understand its meaning.

REVIEW: Renovating & Moving 2010, Part I

We moved again in 2010, mainly because we wanted to downsize and save money and because the house was badly soundproofed and we could hear absolutely everything through the walls. The neighbors above drove us nuts!
We did not have to renovate that new appartment either, or at least that was the plan.
The reality was that renovations were not even halfway finished; meaning that we moved into a construction area.

I don't want to go too much into detail because thinking about it still makes me angry, but i don't want those negative vibes here on my blog.
So let me just say that we had to live with the builders and painters for more than two weeks.
There was dirt absolutely everywhere; it was horrible. Wallpaper scraps, dust, paint, every possible dirt on this planet was in our appartment. 
We could not cook because there was no kitchen to cook in. Most of our food expired and we had to throw it away because we could not cook. We could not wash our laundry because there was no finished water connection. We used the washing machine as our "kitchen table" instead.
Thank goodness i was smart enough to pack my uniform into a large handbag, seperately from the other clothes, otherwise i would have had a serious problem. 

We played Tetris with our furniture, moving boxes and the renovator's supplies every day. We moved items from one room to another, from the left corner to the right corner, stacked them from top to bottom and back to top. It was almost impossible to find the things we needed and it really stressed us. But it was also funny, somehow, and we constantly whistled the Tetris music, haha.
We're still doing it whenever we rearrange items, it's like a running gag.

Let's take a look at the desaster. The photos are in random order. I still can't believe we actually moved in and lived in that mess, but what else could we do?
We should have claimed compensation but at least we refused to pay the rent for that period of time.

The photos are in random order and i will show the single rooms in Part II.

This is what our "living" situation looked like:

Our "bed":