Nestdrang

We decided to give the builders a hand and start with the painting this weekend. So armed with rollers, brushes and two massive buckets of paint we started on the ceiling of our love nest.



Yesterday we put on the first layer of special primer and today we did the first layer of latex. It still needs at least another layer of latex, but as you can see on the pictures above, it makes quite a difference already.

We finished the baby room, both toilets, the hall and both bedrooms and as soon as the builders have finished in the other rooms we can continue there. Or as soon as we manage to put our arms down again, since they seem to be stuck in the air from working above our heads for two days in a row! Whatever happens first...

Jigsaw tiles

As we are now approaching the final stages of reconfiguring and redesigning our house, the time has come to concentrate on the fun stuff: the final touches.

With the plastering done, the builders have now started tiling the bathroom and toilets. As you can see on the left, they first made a puzzle of Jugendstil tiles in the living room to get the pattern right before tiling.

The upstairs toilet has already been tiled and the patterned tiles work really well. It is so good to see our ideas materialise and our house come together. It is even better that it looks so great. I am sure many a pleasurable moment will be spent in there. Now we just need a magazine rack!

Garden coming on in leaps and bounds...

...but will it be finished before the end of the barbeque season?


The builder/landscape gardener has been working very hard! And he's had to, since it appears that the old owners simply covered the old garden with sand (pathing et al) and laid the "new" tiles straight on top of it! Since our garden requires a step down and some deep wall foundations to be laid, the old patio... and the old old garden all had to be removed. It took some 130 large plastic bags to remove all the old bricks and tiles that were concealed beneath the existing patio!


The laying of the tiles at the back of the garden, under the "veranda" is almost complete and as you can see from the picture above, we get some sun in the garden! It's this area where we plan to do our sitting and eating, but it now appears that Flo will be able to top up her tan; the gardeners report that the sun enters the garden here at approximately midday and remains until about 5pm. This will undoubtedly be the kitties (particularly Boris') favourite spot in the garden!


It turns out that the garden is slightly wider than anticipated (someone didn't measure it properly!) so the path running through the garden will be slightly wider than planned. As you can see form the pictures above, the low level walls are about finished and ready for plastering and painting.


Work has started on the remaining paving of the patio, which will be at a 35 degree angle to draw the eyes towards the flower beds and to make the garden feel a little wider. As you can see from the picture above, our builder/landscape gardener is not archetypical, since he sports a rather disappointing builder's crack. The other picture above is a detail of the step at the bottom of the garden and is especially for our garden designer... I hope it's to your high standards Harrie!?


Inside the house, the new, super-duper, all bells and whistles central heating and water boiler has been fitted. The building contractor ended up buying a high spec one with two independent boilers (one for the central heating and one for hot water, primarily to supply the rain shower at sufficient rate). Only problem is, it's a bit of a beast in terms of dimensions, so it's a bit bigger than the cupboard in which it's supposed to fit. So the cupboard now needs to be made a little deeper. Also, plastering has begun upstairs, as you can see from the picture above which is from the bathroom, with the fittings installed for the sink and wall lighting. Tiling of the bathroom should start by the end of this week (or early next week).


The majority of downstairs has now been plastered, as you can see from the pictures above. We can therefore start with the first coat of primer this weekend!

The kitchen was scheduled to be delivered this weekend also, but it turns out they need an extra week after the guys who are manufacting the end pieces made a mistake and therefore need to re-manufacture them. But this is fine, since the kitchen can't be installed until the floor has been finished, which probably won't be for another couple of weeks yet.

So things are moving along nicely and my confidence for being able to move in on September 1st is high... we might even have all the painting finished and the floors laid by then... but my main concern is whether or not we'll still be having the nice weather, since I'm desperately looking forward to that first barbeque in the garden!

Adventures in Otterlo

After Flo convinced me to take Friday off work (well, actually I forgot to book the day off as holiday), our weekend away got off to a typical start... stuck in traffic on the motorway after some Volvo driver decided to test out the famed car's safety features by driving the car into the back of a lorry. Stupid Volvo drivers!

Fortunately, we weren't delayed long and arrived at our splendid little hotel located just on the outskirts of Het Nationale Park De Hoge Veluwe. After quickly acclimatising to our hotel room, we realised that it's not pleasant staying in un-airconditioned rooms in the height of global warming powered summers and so ventured out straight to the National Park.

The park operates a "white bike" system, whereby lots and lots of white bikes are maintained within the park's grounds which visitors can utilise as and when they please, simply picking one up and dropping it at the designated area. Apparently this social scheme was tried out in Amsterdam one time, but failed miserably since everyone just knicked the bikes. However, I'm happy to report that in the park the system works great, although it's amusing to see how quickly people become attached to their chosen bikes... we actually saw people hiding them when they had to leave them behind to go off the cycle path to view a monument or garden.


The scenery in the park is surreal and varies from vast, sandy baron wastes (as above) to dense coniferous woodlands, complete with wild deer and boar (the grounds did once belong to the Kröller-Müller family as a hunting retreat, the reason that they built their meagre hunting lodge in the centre of the grounds, pictured below). Also located throughout the park are strange wooden cut-outs of little girls (also pictured below). This is presumably to entertain the many Belgian visitors to the park?



While cycling through the park, Flo rediscovered the delight of cycling zonder handen on the bars! The entire cycle back to the entrance of the park was to a sound-track of giggles and exclamations of "look, no hands!". The benefit of this behaviour was that we did get to spot lots of deer, since they were presumably so startled that they made an equal amount of noise as they scarpered deeper into the woodland. After a long day of driving and cycling, we headed back to the hotel and enjoyed a well earned four course meal at the hotel, finishing off the night with Flo teaching me how to play the apparently popular game of Rummikub.

Saturday was spent... cycling. It was supposed to be a reasonable 45 kilometres, but probably ended up being more like 50 km. It showed us again how diverse the countryside is in this part of Nederland, through deciduous woodland and farmland along the Heidi route (I kept thinking of the classic TV programme with Heidi running through the grass with the alps in the background). We got very hot and sweaty and had lunch at a lovely refurbished castle, complete with ducks in the moat.

We returned to the National Park this morning to have a look around the Kröller-Müller Museum, located inside the park. They have a large garden at the museum in which there are a huge collection of statues and sculptures. It was very relaxing walking around and viewing the displays, but I admit that I started to get concerned as Flo began airing her thoughts and reactions to the art pieces...


...apparently this is a statue made of used hormone injection needles...


...these are follicles...


...and the title of this piece is how the Dutch refer to an ultra-sound scan.

It was at this point where I thought it best for us to return home, back to some daily routine, since our minds were obviously being given far too much time to wander!

You can see more pictures from our adventures in Otterlo here.

Barbeque bunk bed

Today the Netherlands feel like Dubai in the summer, including the humidity. Only difference is that in Dubai everything was air-conditioned: houses, offices, shops, restaurants; so to escape the scorching desert heat we used to avoid being outside as much as possible and run from the house to the car and from the car into the office and vice versa. A bit like we do here in the middle of the winter.

In the Dubai summer Boris and Boika used to lie in the door opening straight under the air-conditioning looking into the garden, enjoying the best of both worlds. As we have neither at the moment, they just sort of drop down somewhere and and try not to move too much. A very sensible thing to do.

When I enter the room that they are lying in they half lift their little heads and look at me, as to say: "please make this heat stop. We are Russian Blues and our coats are not designed for this."



I tried telling them about hot air going up and the attic really not being the best place to be in in this weather, but to little avail. To alleviate their misery a bit I moved the fan into the room. They seemed to like it.



However, they soon found an even better solution to withstand the heat: