This is the house update you are looking for.

[oloriel]

So what has turned me into such a crabby hermit who only uses her LJ for pointless arguments these days and doesn't even remember flist birthdays?
And what, you will ask (or at any rate eliathanis did, reminding me that I am keeping even my friends sadly in the dark), is happening around The House?

The reason for the total silence on that subject is that there are so many desasters and projects around the house that I wouldn't know where to start talking about it. Besides, I have to deal with that mess in real life, what makes you think I want to talk about it when we finally called it a day?

But of course I am also crabby when I read about other people's busy times and of course I want to be admired for my heroism (...), and I'll hate myself for not having kept a record in five or so years when I'll be wondering just what the hell I did in 2009 aside from ranting, so I am trying a new approach.

I took some pictures of our current tribulations, which (I hope) will give me a kind of guideline to know what I'm talking about as well as provide you with something to look at when my descriptive rambling falls short.



Pics can be looked at in somewhat greater size by clicking on 'em, should you so desire.

So. June to September of 2009 in a coupla colourful pictures.



So this is the house. Dang, that's a sweet house, you might say.
WRONG.

However, we are currently not doing much in the house (where such lovely things as wall insulation, clay plaster, new stairwells, new flooring and overall NEW things wait to be done), but outside work. After all, outside work can only be done when it's reasonably dry and reasonably warm (like, more than 4°C). Inside work can wait until autumn hits its full rainy stride. House is old, will likely manage to get a little older yet without our helping hands. Although... notice the ugly tarboard on that one bit of wall? Yeah, we had to replace the timberwork underneath. Our fucktard predecessors had repaired little wholes in the wall by pouring concrete in. You know what concrete does to oak beams? Applied physics is what. Applied physics that even oak beams do not survive. Astonishing enough the house was in such good shape when we bought it.
(And yes, we are actually living inside this construction site (for a given value of "living"). Joy.)
But at any rate there's nothing life-threatening as long as you don't scratch on the walls or something. We don't currently touch it. There's the ugly P word after all: Priorities.


Mentioning the ugly P word, this is a victim of it: The garden. I totally have a garden. I just don't have time to tend it.
On plus side we have fertile soil, and if we didn't mind living on potatoes, beans, tomatoes, mangold, wild plums, onions, nuts and sour apples for the rest of the month, at least we wouldn't have to spend any money on food. God, are we broke.
Note that the former pigsty behind the garden has a roof now. That happened in, what, May? Or something. One of many steps towards turning that thing into a combined boiler room/workshop/smithy.



This used to be a trough for horses or cows. As the stones-and-cement it is made of draw water and you'll doubtlessly remember that physics lesson about what happens when water gets into stone cracks and freezes there, it was pretty decrepit. We put it back in order, and to protect it from getting all broken up again when the next winter comes around, it was painted inside with underwater paint. Did you know that underwater paint is only available in "atlantic blue" and "polar green"? No? Well, we went and found out for you. No, we didn't choose that abominable swimming pool colour of our own free will.
This was a quick and satisfying project for in between. Satisfying because you actually see the fruits of your work.

Also, toads keep falling in. This year the garden is full of toads, I have no idea where they all come from, perhaps this has just been a very toad-friendly year climate-wise or something. There were only two or three toads at all last year, and this year there's dozens wandering around. Some fall into the trough and don't get out. I have saved ten or more toads in the past week. Saving animals is always satisfying (I apparently take my importance kicks from saving helpless little creatures, which I suppose is not the worst way of feeling important and valuable), and toads are such underappreciated beauties. They have the most amazing eyes.



This, on the other hand, is a huge mess now, but when it's done you won't see the biggest part of it. Bah.

This is currently Priority Number One. So why have we torn up our beautiful yard? Welll. I did mention that the pigsty was to be turned into a boiler room, right? Now this was originally planned to be done in five years or something, but it was pointed out to us that it might be smarter to do it now when we don't yet have to do it, rather than wait until the heating inside the house breaks down (and whenever that'd happen, it'd surely be in winter, because furnaces always break down in winter) because that'd put us under a lot of additional pressure that'd likely result in some crappy make-shift solution whereas now we can take it nice and slow and do it right.
Uh huh.
That was in June, and labouring under the assumption that we'd pay someone else to tear up the ground for the pipes and plumbing, so we'd hardly have to do anything about this. The installation of the new boiler and furnace, the laying of the pipes and the connection of the out-sorced boiler to the inside heaters will have to be done by a specialist company anyway. And while we're at it, we also want to have solar collectors on the south-facing roof of the big shed. That is slightly hypocritic as we know that solar collectors are, with the current state of the technology, frankly a big waste of energy and money – but this country pays well if you put solar collectors on your roof and produce a little surplus energy (though we're taking the heating solution rather than the energy-producing solution, because the heating is at least somewhat more efficient).
Anyway.
The company who would have torn up the ground wanted 4000 € (yes, four thousand) just for tearing up the ground. So we said something along the lines of Fuck you, we'll do it ourselves (only we were a little more polite), and started doing it ourselves. It's not like we have 4000 € spare in the first place, let alone to waste them on something we can do ourselves.



We soon found out what we (or the company) hadn't known before: Below the cobbles and the concrete floor of the pigsty, there is NOT, as would normally be the case, sand and gravel. No, our lovely predecessors (or, likely, their ancestors, as the pigsty probably dates from the 1930s and the cobbling in the yard is for the most part even older) found out that the ground was pretty rocky, so they were too lazy to do much digging and just put everything on the rocks. That explains a lot.
We discovered the same problem when we started digging up the pigsty walls for insulation last year, which took us well into this year and still isn't quite finished (we'll get there later), so I guess we shouldn't have been surprised.
So we tore up the, excuse my Middle English, fucking bedrock. It should only be shale in the Bergian, but for fun and entertainment it is randomly interspersed with basalt and granite and grey limestone WHICH SHOULD NOT EVEN EXIST IN THIS PART OF THE WORLD FUCK YOU AULË I HATE YOU TOO – sorry about that.
Anyway.
We rented an excavator for part of the work (€€) and a jackhammer for other parts (€€). However, this being Germany and even in this secluded place neighbours being neighbours, you canNOT use noisy machinery between 12 and 3 pm or at any time on a Sunday. And because we also have to work to earn, you know, money, for the most part we can only work on weekends, or a few hours in the week. Rented machinery is too expensive to rent for only a few hours. One day is not exactly enough as it is.
So we also used a pickaxe for a damned lot of the work. On plus side: I now know what it feels like to put a pickaxe to shale (all right), granite (urgh), grey limestone (AUGH MY WRISTS) and basalt (they use it in road construction and for cobbles because it is "very hard, but not brittle". INDEED). Valuable knowledge, no doubt, which will help me immensely if I ever write a story about stonemasons or something.
To protect the pipes from damage through pressure (e.g. of cars driving into the yard) or frost, they have to be at least 80 cm under the earth.
80 cm are fucking deep if you're dígging into stone with a pickaxe.



See the floor on the left-hand side? It used to look the same on the right-hand side. We did all that. (The right-hand side is the boiler-room side of the sty.) It is not yet enough. *weeps*

BTW, turns out that the furnace on the tenant's side of the house is being crazy. It's still working, just barely, but nobody can tell how long and it's pretty definite that it would've broken down for good next winter. It is obviously a good thing that we started working on the boiler room & pipe ducts. New tenants will move in come November, so we'll HAVE to be done by then. Fun.
Actually we'd have to be done come November anyway because of course the frost-protection only works when the ducts are filled up again, not open.



This is the insulation and drainage project I mentioned above and off and on in this journal. As you can see it has progressed to a point at which you can't really see that we dug three bloody meters into the bloody rock only to fill the ditch up again with gravel and earth after insulating the walls of the pigsty and putting drainage pipes all around it. ;_;



Two out of three walls are done, at least. This corner, and the third wall, are still in different stages of preparation. The fourth wall (not in the literary sense but in the literal sense, hah) is the one with the doors that you saw on the pics of the yard excavations, so at least it doesn't have to be dug up. >.<



Here you can see some of the digging we've already done, and a lot that we still have to do. You can also nicely see the different layers. On the left, downwards: trees (with roots, damn roots), grass (also with roots), some earth (lovely soft easily diggable earth) and ROCK. On the right, from pigsty side towards watcher: bricks & mortar, cement, bitumen paint, insulation boards of some polystyrene or other, fugly brown insulation sheets, gravel (which you can't see here but surely noticed on one of the earlier pics) to take rainwater safely down into the drainage pipes, glass wool fleece for additional insulation, press boards that are really just for our convenience and will later rot away. What's left of the ditch after that will be refilled with earth and all the chopped-up rock. We have a lot of that after all.
This is probably overkill; probably a somewhat simpler insulation solution would also have worked, if not quite so perfectly. However, my husband is of the opinion that while we're at it, we may as well do it properly so we never have to touch it again. Which is perfectly correct and perfectly reasonable unless you're the one who has to take a pickaxe to grey limestone, or carry bucket after bucket of gravel.

If you look closely, you can also see a blue drainage pipe peeking out of the ditch. Poor thing is using its last chance to get some air and light, clearly, seeing how it'll end up buried under heaps of rock till the end of the world.
Ar-Pharazôn: *sympathises*



There, 'nuff rock! This lovely piece of meadow hides the smelly cesspit of doom. Like the furnace, it is technically still working, but we have no idea in what state it actually is, and we figure it may be smarter to have it replaced by a new cesspit before it breaks down and the city and conservation agency (did I mention that the house is on the edge of a nature reserve?) kill us, not to mention the joys of several cubic meters of shit and urine making a happy swamp in our garden. This will be done entirely by a specialist company (€€€€ ;_;). On plus side, this is a step towards a more environmentally friendly cesspit, which is not only good for the green conscience but also, like the solar collectors, supported by the state. The new cesspit will feature a three-tank system and a mini wetpark so much of the waste water will be cleaned up naturally by time and plants and clever microbes and evaporation. On plus side, this will give me a chance to grow lovely water plants (though with our budget in mind, perhaps I should rather grow rice?), and in the long term it'll seriously lower our sewage costs – and, of course, we no longer run the risk of the old cesspit randomly deciding to stop functioning or tunnelling in. It'd probably do that in August, when the new tenants' kiddies are playing on top of it so they'd fall into the excremental swamp. At least one of them would drown. Not to mention the stench you'd get around a broken-down cesspit in the August heat.

As you can see, my head is full of worst-case scenarios. Thanks, we'll deal with it now.
(One German do-it-yourself market used the tagline "Finish it before it finishes you". That's kind of our motto. Aside from nihil obstat and nemo me impune lacessit, obviously.)

In the short run, however, it'll eat up a lot of money that we don't actually have.
(I think the main definition of being grown-up is the ability to spend money that you don't actually have in dizzying proportions.)

Again, there are some slightly cheaper solutions that would work as well in the short term, but not in the long, and we're all about long-term solutions. My husband seems to be channeling Fëanor most of the time. Whatever we do, we do it perfectly and then some. >_>

And no, the green-white tank thing has nothing to do with the cesspit. That's the liquid gas tank. We're heating and cooking with gas.



The new cesspit won't go into the place of the old cesspit, however, because it'll need more room. The place of the old cesspit will be filled up with a) a lot of the earth and rocks we dug up, because that has to go somewhere; the ducts will be filled with gravel and sand, so in case we ever need to work on the pipes again, we can reach them easily. Lesson learned.) , and b) with a rainwater cistern for domestic use. Even though drinking water is fairly cheap around here (we have a lot of drinking-quality water), it's kind of a shame to use it for washing or flushing the toilet. To be honest our rainwater is of drinking quality as well, if you catch it in a clean vessel, but at least we'll no longer be sending the filtered, purified water from the waterworks right into the cesspit.
So this is where the new cesspit will go: to the left of the small walnut tree/ raspberry thicket. The meadow is ours (although we currently rent it to people with horses, because what do we need yet more meadow for?), and the few square meters that'll be used up for the wetpark won't make much of a difference. The meadow is still big enough for the horsies.



Incidentally, guess who gets to mow the grass here? Yes, yours truly, that's right! And the grass grows fast in our climate. I guess I gotta be grateful that the only snakes that live around here are ring snakes, which aren't venomous, and that there are no other poisonous critters that like to hide in high grass. Otherwise I'd have to push the lawn-mower up the hill and down the hill even more often.
(Random information: I tend to recite poetry to myself while lawn-mowing. Don't ask why. I have to keep occupied somehow - the lawn-mower is too loud for audiobooks after all. Even more random information: Back when my grandmother had to do boring assembly line work with the Reichsarbeitsdienst, she used to recite poetry to herself too. Must be genetic.)



Ah, yes. This is the living-room of the tenants' part of the house (or, until 1997, the cowshed), as seen through the terrace door. The asshole tenant finally moved out in June, and the new tenants won't move in until November (and yes, that's a lot of money that we're not getting in between). At least this gives us a chance to repair some of the damage our predecessors and the asshole tenant left for us. Actually we could use a lot more time to properly insulate the walls and renovate the ceilings and windows and--- but we can't afford not renting out the flat for so long, nor can we currently afford the materials, so the tenants will have to do with the flat as it is. We will have to secure the stairwell, though, because even though our predecessors had everything done by overpaid specialists, the bolts that keep the stairwell together are already breaking. After twelve years. And this, my friends, is what you get when you take the "this is cheaper and it'll do for now" solution: Just one decade and shit breaks down. I rest my case.



This is the heap of cut twigs and brambles and other large-ish garden rubbish. We've been meaning to rent a chaff cutter to turn the heap into mulch, but never got around to do it. By now we'd have to evict a lot of stinging nettles and quite possibly ring snakes, blindworms and/or hedgehogs in order to shred the rubbish, so I suppose the heap will just stay there until kindly decomposition takes care of it.



Speaking of brambles, these are two of our bramble thickets of doom. I think they eat small animals. They certainly try to eat people who are busy mowing the lawn minding their own business reciting poetry, and tear up their hands and arms. Fought with your cats? I have been asked. No, brambles. Devilish stuff. Razor wire isn't allowed for non-military use, but frankly, who needs razor wire when you can have brambles? Grow fast, grow everywhere, can't be exterminated.



And of course I don't want to exterminate the brambles. They carry lovely blackberries, after all. If only there weren't meters upon meters of non-fruitbearing tendrils.



This is the shed. It is tore up plenty, but it'll stand true. I hope. This is where we store all the tools, any especially old furniture, all the workshop, smithy and gardening stuff, firewood for the next five or six years, timber for house reparations, assorted bricks, and really random stuff like 25 suits of Roman armour in three different sizes. Go on, ask. I dare you.

There also seems to be a family of owls living in the shed, and there definitely is a hive of wild bees, although it's grown very quiet recently. Oh, and there are swallows nesting under the roof.

None of them pay rent. Not even the bees. >_>



Wild plums! Yes, they are ripe, despite the colour. I made jam and chutney (the latter with onions and figs and spices) of them. This year was a very good fruit year (apparently our trees dig long, hard winters and wet summers. Does that sound dirty? DIRTY TREES.), we had insane amounts of blackberries and elderberries (even though I stole a lot of elderflowers in spring to make vinegar and syrup) and wild plums. The apple trees are also full, as is the medlar tree (but those can't be used before the first frost, unless I cheat and collect the medlars and put them into the freezer, mwahahah). The walnut tree doesn't carry more nuts than before, but they're much larger this year. ...dirty trees indeed.
The wild plums never even ripened in the past years, and this year I had insane amounts of them. They're pretty rare around here; you find more of them in the south, where the fruits are used almost exclusively for making liquor. I had to ask the resident Austrian on my flist on what to do with the fruit because everybody else just said "No idea". Or "LIQUOUR!".

- - -

So why, you may ask, and rightfully so, does the Lyra not do something sensible with what's left of her time, rather than rant and bitch about pointless things, or try to keep a travel diary from half a year ago, or write obscure fanfiction, or produce mediocre fanart, or sew a dress, or plan to go to a LARP this weekend?

And the answer is: The Lyra can only handle so much reason. When I've worked either on the house or for university or done my time at work, I'm incabable of doing anything sensible like tidying up my study or cleaning the living-room or writing papers. Sometimes brainless bitching on the internets, recording the misadventures of Númenorean embalmers, or spending a weekend in a castle pretending to be someone else are the only things that still keep you sane. Trust me on that.
Or don't. Whatever, really.

The husband, for the record, works yet more than I, for which I admire him, but then the husband is also older and wiser and more capable. :p

Also note that Jörg's mother spends every weekend helping us on the house, whereas my parents (who are younger) don't do anything except spout wise advice. That'd be fine if they helped us in other ways, like, I dunno, helping to fund the projects they want us to tackle first (i.e. the stairwell in our part of the flat - veeery far down on the priority list as we're currently both young and healthy and unpregnant enough to climb) or the workers to do the work we "shouldn't break our backs with" (surprise: breaking other people's backs is EXPENSIVE, and seeing the crap work paid workers did for our predecessors, doing the work ourselves may be smarter in the long run). No, my parents are totally out of money, which is probably why they'll go on a two-week educational journey to Turkey in a fortnight after their educational journey to Spain in March. It's not that I begrudge them their holidays, or expect that they support us (though it would be bloody helpful). I just wish they wouldn't keep telling us how they'd love to help us but they can't afford it, and in the same breath tell us that they bought a leaf blower, or that they won't be at home for two weeks because they're taking another Studiosus trip.

Eh well. The ugly P word again, y/n?
[/laundry]



- - -

And now, because I realised I never posted the promised photos of Helmut the titmouse, have some representational memorial pictures.



A day after we found him, looking ruffled and grumpy.


Two days later, still grumpy but no longer so ruffled.


2+ weeks after the rescue. The tit by then knew how to fly, it only had to learn to feed itself. Our baby grew up so fast!


Who needs photoshop when you can have silly snapshots like this?

;_;



This concludes today's tour of the grounds and works. Hope you had fun. I didn't. (Well, I had fun writing this. I don't have fun working around here. It's nice for a day or two and then it gets really old really fast.)

That said, I still love the house. I just wish we were already done with all the working and could actually live. >_>

Apologies for the cursing and the overuse of rhetoric questions. I am not currently at my very finest, in case anyone didn't notice.

Comments

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

I'm feeling exhausted and in need of a vacation and a massage just from READING all this.

I am seriously in awe of you.

*admires*

[http://users.livejournal.com/macalla_/]

Ah fein - wie ist denn das Chutney geworden? Ich persönlich liebe Chutney ja ...
Und hast dus mit oder ohne Flotte Lotte hingekriegt?

Und was das restliche Haus angeht: Ja, man kann leicht sagen 'Ihr wohnt soooo idyllisch' - aber was das Arbeit ist, sehen die Leute seltener. Kenn ich vom Haus meiner Schwiegereltern.

[barbardin.livejournal.com]

Herrje.. du kriegst eine Tapferkeitsmedaille. Ich kenne diese Dauerbaustellen, es zehrt an den Nerven und... nein, die Zeit macht's nicht besser. *drück* Irgendwann werdet ihr die großen Probleme abgehakt haben und euch drüber freuen, ganz bestimmt.

[yueni]

Oh god. I'm exhausted just reading this. I can't even begin to imagine how exhausted you must be! Keep on trucking! One day you'll have the amazing home you've always wanted.

[independence1776]

*jaw drops* And I thought my spending three days removing wallpaper was tough! No wonder why you're exhausted. Good luck with everything!

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

Hoooly hell. That sounds like a life's project.

[eliathanis.livejournal.com]

Bin erst jetzt dazugekommen alles... ehrlich gesagt nicht komplett zu lesen nur gründlich zu überfliegen (mein Gehirn wehrt sich etwas gegen Englisch mit soviel Bauarbeitervokabular ^^;)... und ich sende dir alles an mentalen Kraftreserven, die ich habe, weil OMG das ist wirklich ein Wahnsinn! Großer Respekt, viele hugs und ein noch undefiniertes Hilfsangebot - Details per Mail!