In our ‘kitchen’ (I use the term loosely) was this weird little wall built around the sink area. We were going to get the builder to remove it but, well, we got a little carried away and decided to knock it down ourselves. We had a few tools left in the house, including an ancient sledgehammer, how hard can it be? So Rob got tooled up, donned his most sturdy flip-flops and got to work. Halfway through, the ancient sledgehammer broke, but we found the wall was not actually fixed to anything, so we just pushed the rest of it over! It was an amazing moment, when east met west. There was hugging and crying and the event inspired at least one soft rock anthem. Okay fine, that was the Berlin wall. But our wall coming down was cool too.
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| Before... |
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| ...during (note the health and safety footwear)... |
And then, our full ‘kitchen’ was revealed in all its, er, glory. The knocking down took no time at all, but sadly the clearing up the bricks, rubble and dust took most of the next day! We lost a windowpane during ‘the fall’ – stray flying bricks will do that to glass. Whoops. Oh well, collateral damage. We’ll just add it to the list of windows that need replacing. Given the lack of appropriate footwear, we’re lucky no one broke a toe!
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| ...and after! |
We also had to clear the downstairs room that will become our bathroom. It was being used as a storeroom and was full of junk. Some of it good junk – spare roof tiles, cooking pots, tools - but a lot of it was rubbish. Rob was in charge of that lovely task; I wouldn’t go in there on account of the large spider population. We dumped what we didn’t want in the garden. Our neighbour, Svilen then spent the next few days trying to move everything back into our house! He probably thinks we’re really wasteful, but honestly we couldn’t find a use for the stuff.
And we cleared a bit of the garden (again, with Svilen’s help) and trimmed the grape vines. Didn’t get around to trimming the enormous apple tree – that’s job number one when we go back in August!
