Where we are so far

When we left Condadeuil last May, we planned to return about now, expecting most of the interior work (repairing and refinishing the flooring on the mezzanine, repairing the leak-damaged walls, painting the high ceiling on the mezzanine) to be finished by mid-July. Then we'd spend three weeks finishing off painting and add storage and shelving so that we could move directly into the house.

Instead none of the interior work is done, except for replacing a previously closed opening with a glass brick window. Here's what it looks like inside now, brightening up the dark corner in the living/dining room:

Looks great, doesn't it? Previously this opening was closed by what appeared to be a door on the outside, but the inside was just a niche in the wall. On the outside, which still needs to be finished off, we have a ledge where we can put some potted geraniums or some such, so we can see the color from the inside.

Here's another interesting problem that has come up in July:

You're looking at a window in the master bedroom. The outside shutters are closed and the window is closed. The black mass is a beehive. The room has been shut and its windows closed and shuttered since we left in May; bees thought that was just up their alley and have build hives in both windows. Bees are protected, so our local beekeeper will remove them at no charge. We can't imagine what kind of mess this will make!

Since Kaye will go into HP's early retirement program in September and Ed will also be pressured to accept any job paying the same as his unemployment pay, we've decided to put our household into storage and move to France in September. We hope we can finish most of the work to be done in the next two months and call for our stuff out of storage at the first of December.

To this end, our house in Amstelveen is now on the market -- if you're interested, look here. (Since these photos were taken, we've replaced that horrible lamp hanging in the living room and rearrange our bedroom so it looks a bit roomier. The rearranging is something we've been talking about for a long time, but have just now gotten around to.) We've gotten bids from movers and will decide this weekend which we will use. We've been clearing out stuff, trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have to move and to make the house look less crowded. Although this is sometimes quite difficult, it's also a bit liberating in a way.

The posts to date have getting up to the present. Future posts will be as-they-happen rather than past. We've been fairly sporadic with keeping folks up-to-date so far and right now things are happening starting to happen fast, so communication will fall further by the wayside. We're hoping this blog will serve as a way to let folks know what's happening with us.

Stay tuned!