Week 62: 28 - 31 August

Sep. 12, 2023

The first thing we do before we write a new blog post is review the last one and see where we ended. After reviewing the last one (sorry it’s been so long!), we realised exactly how much has happened in this time.

Carpets, Doors and Floors

We learned later from our neighbors that the guys who were installing our carpets, doors and floors were at the house until 1am Thursday night finishing the wood floors. They then needed to wait for the glue from the wood floors todry and so took a well-deserved 3-day weekend and returned early Monday morning to install the upstairs carpets and all of the doors. When we arrived, the carpets were in and looked really nice in their respective rooms. We could finally see how the house was going to look…

Around the same time, another worker was downstairs starting the install of the door frames.

Once the carpets were installed, they began the installs of the door frames upstairs.

Another worker was downstairs working on the doors themselves and installing the hinges and door handles. The doors themselves were delivered without either and so needed to have the hardware added onsite.

We returned the next evening and almost everything was done. All of the doors were installed, the baseboards on the ground floor were complete. The only things left were the carpeted stair treads which needed to be custom-made off-site and the upstairs “baseboards.” These also have to be made offsite because some of them are wooden and some are carpet. The carpet installers will return later to install all of those and finish that up.

The House is “Ours”

While there are no exciting photos to show for it, the best thing that happened that week is that the house was officially turned over to us. The building company removed their lock, installed a new one that no one else had the keys to and handed it over. Except for a few fixes that needed to be made and the baseboards upstairs, the house was ours. This meant that we could really start to move in (even without a kitchen) and not worry about workers being there at all hours of the day.

The Porta-Potty is gone!

Two large piles of construction debris had been removed the week before and now the portapotty was gone.

We were slowly getting our front yard back…

Exterior Shutters

This summer has had some record heat and we’ve been a little bit worried about the fact that we hadn’t installed air conditioning in the house.
During the past few weeks, we’ve had some record heat and since we’ve been spending more and more time there, we’ve gotten a chance to use our exterior shutters and see how they work. We’ve been really pleased with the results and can feel a clear difference when we keep them closed when they’re exposed to direct sunlight on the hottest days.

Moving and Room Layouts

With the floors in, we were able to finally start moving in the boxes - some of which have been packed since January, when we still naively thought that the house would be ready to move into in February!

Stano’s office has it’s first load of boxes.

Lauren’s office also has boxes. As we started to get boxes unloaded, we started to move them around the rooms to start to think about layouts for future furniture and cabinets in the rooms. Since closets don’t really exist here, one of the first things that people do when they move in is have custom wardrobes installed. In this example, Lauren will have full height cabinets immediately to the right upon entering the office and the knee wall will have drawers for all of her sewing and office supplies. All of the boxes here so a rough approximation of how much floor space that would take up in the room.

We did the same thing in the guest bedroom. The wall of XXL Bauhaus boxes on the left is intentionally stacked like that to give an idea of how the view into the room would look with full height cabinets installed on that wall to the left.

As you look straight into the room on the right, you can see where a hide-a-bed couch will go for our guests. When we don’t have guests, Lauren will use the space for a cutting table for her sewing projects which will fold up and be put away when guests are here. The 3 boxes that you can see on the floor in a rectangular shape are where the cutting table will fit when open.

Some Minor Fixes

When Atrium handed the house over to us, there were still some minor fixes to be done. The screws that came with the front door handle were too short and so we had to wait for them to return with longer screws. Now we have a front door handle!

Throughout the entire building process, the window in the downstairs bathroom hadn’t worked properly. Basically, if you wanted to to open the window all the way, the window itself would fall out. Can you guess how heavy these windows are? Anyway, they finally fixed it…at which point we discovered that the light on the medicine cabinet was about one centimeter too long and the window couldn’t open. We’re now waiting for a replacement medicine cabinet that doesn’t have the overhang for the light.

Master Bedroom Closet

While closets absolutely can exist in Czech Republic, as previously mentioned, they’re fairly uncommon in bedrooms. After living without one for 4 year in Brno, however, Lauren really wanted one so when we had the house designed, we included one in the master bedroom.

Since the house came without anything actually IN the closet in the form of shelving, rods, etc, we now had a lovely closet that was pretty much useless except for storing boxes. We’re waiting to install the actual closet hardware until after most of the exterior work is finished but we still wanted to be able to use the closet. So what did we do? We headed to IKEA, of course.

As we talk to people about how things work and the process they went through to move into their homes, it’s been obvious that the process here is so different from what Lauren was used to in US. In US, you generally can’t just decide at any random point that you’re ready to move into a new house. You have to have the occupancy permit which means that the house has to have a certain amount of things complete which varies from place to place. You absolutely have to have running water, toilets that flush, a kitchen, heating and whatever else that particular location deems necessary for living in a new house.

Here, it’s completely different. Even though you need everything listed above for an occupancy permit, people here usually move into their houses long before the occupancy permit arrives. Most people even move in before the kitchen is installed. Our neighbor told us yesterday that they were in their house for 2 months before the kitchen was installed, another friend for 3 months and another is currently living in their house without hot water or a kitchen and so take showers at work every day since they don’t have hot water at home. It’s a very different process here.

This also often happens because people run out of house building money. Since income levels are so low here, people often can’t afford to get a mortgage big enough to cover the cost of an entire house so they do pieces of it as they go and to save money, move in as soon as they can, even if significant pieces are missing. They might move into the house and wait to do exterior work and landscaping for a few years until they can afford it.

While we don’t have that problem, we still have a lot of exterior work to be done - the driveway, cladding, pool, grading of the property, etc and we are being very conservative about how we spend our money until that is done. That being said, we’re not having our closet system installed until the exterior work is done and the other rooms will come later. With that in mind, we wanted to get temporary storage that we could move from room to room as we finish the installs in each room.

We spend an afternoon putting together the biggest shelving unit that we could find. By “we”, I mean that Stano did most of the work while Lauren chased the puppy around the house, pulling chunks of cardboard from the boxes out of her mouth as she tried to eat it.

The storage unit is in and ready for “stuff”.

We also have a ton of things on hangers that we didn’t want to try to pack in boxes (wardrobe boxes don’t exist here), like Stano’s suits and Lauren’s dresses and so we got a few hanging racks. After our closet is installed, we’ll move one of these into the house entryway for guests to hang their coats and one will go into Lauren’s sewing room until the wardrobes there are installed.

The first batch of clothes are hung. Mainly suits, dresses and winter jackets.

Our First Couch

The main problem with buying furniture before a space actually exists is that you run the risk that it won’t end up working out the way you wanted to. This is exactly what happened in the case of our first couch. Our original plan was to have a built-in sleeping option in every room (guest bedroom, the sewing room, Stano’s office and obviously, the master bedroom) but once the rooms came together with paint, doors, carpet and boxes, we realised that we really hadn’t effectively accounted for the impact of the upstairs rooms having sloped ceilings. We spent a few weeks moving things around the sewing room, trying to figure out where to put the couch that we had ordered six months earlier for that room and it became clear. Something was going to have to change. If we kept the couch where we had originally planned it for, everyone except kids would hit their head on the sloped ceiling whenever they tried to get to the couch. We could move it to the wall next to the door but then we would lose almost all of the storage space in the room, plus, when the bed was opened, a person getting into the far side of it would still hit their head on the ceiling. That left the only full-height wall in the room which would mean that the sewing design wall would have to go, Lauren’s desk would no longer have a place and basically, there wouldn’t be anywhere to work or sew.

After all of that, we realised that the couch, being navy blue might fit into the living room where we hadn’t even started to plan our furniture yet. The dining room chairs had blue seat covers and the kitchen was going to be blue and white, so even though we didn’t plan for it, maybe it would work.

We took a moving blanket and folded it to be the same size as the couch would be and moved it around the living room to see how it fit. At each spot, we put down the camp chairs to see how it felt sitting there and to get a better idea of what it would like to have something in that space.

After a few tries, we settled on the nook by the fireplace. Our original plan was to having bookshelves here, but we can still do something on the wall above. The only downside is that you can’t see the fireplace from here, but we’ll have other seating options in the room that do have views of the fireplace so that’s okay.

The best part of this location is absolutely the view. Obviously it’s a construction zone out there now but sitting on the couch lets you see the whole backyard, all the way up to the forest behind and once the landscaping is done, it’s going to be beautiful.

And it’s here! It fits nicely in the space and the blue looks really nice with the yellow walls.

Later, we’ll get two long, thing side tables to go on either side of the couch so that there’s a spot for lamps, coasters and drinks. The only real downside of this solution is that this will be our guest space until we get a couch in the guest bedroom.

A Random Flock of Sheep

One of the benefits of Lauren not working during this calendar year has been her ability to run house-related errands throughout the week during work hours and manage a lot of the design details that would otherwise have meant a lot of missed work time and rushed decision-making as we were faced with questions about how we wanted things.

This week, Stano was working on the layout of his office furniture and we needed desktop material samples to take to the house so that we could see how things looked. The material books were located in Slavkov u Brna, about 40 minutes outside of Brno. Lauren headed over there one morning to grab the samples and had an entertaining time trying to figure out where to go. In another completely normal for here mission, Lauren headed to Slavkov, passed by the main town center and headed into a residential area. She then drove through that area and headed into what looked like an old area that couldn’t decide whether it was industrial or agricultural. She finally admitted temporary defeat when she reached a flock of sheep. How could this possibly be the right place for office furniture if there are sheep? After a call to Stano, we finally found the answer…you had to turn right at the sheep, pass a few industrial type buildings and then you were there! It was another interesting lesson in how Czech land-use has changed over time.

The moral of the story? Don’t assume that an office-supply company and a flock of sheep can’t exist next to each other!

After getting the material samples, I stopped to admire the sheep. These guys had a beautiful field full of green grass and I had nothing to offer so I assumed that they would ignore me.

It turns out I was wrong. They saw me approach the fence and came charging over, bahhhh-ing loudly. While they obviously wanted food, they were all super friendly and welcomed head and neck scritches which I happily provided.

A Nice Day for A Walk

After so much running around, we decided over the weekend to go for a walk up the hill behind the house. It’s about 2km, one way and takes about an hour walking slowly up the hill through the woods. We took Boops with us, figuring that she needed an adventure and exercise as much as we did.

Stanovisko is technically a “settlement” at the top of the hill but it’s really about 1 square km of fields at the top of the hill with maybe 3 or 4 really old houses and farms from the 1800’s scattered around. I think that of those, only 1 or 2 actually have occupants. There is a resident flock of sheep and a herd of horses that do live up there full time and they are always fun to see.

Once you get to the top, you have really pretty views of the countryside.

As usual, we were accompanied by the Fanged Beast of Brno who had an absolutely wonderful time.

Stanovisko is pretty and quiet with light breezes, open fields, dirt paths and hot sunshine.

A lot of the areas around the paths are wild and overgrown with all sorts of interesting trees. In this case, several varieties of edible wild plums are ripe and ready to eat.

There are yellow ones,

pink ones,

and red ones…

…all growing together.

There are huge walnut trees with fruit that looks more like an apple than a walnut.

The paths that run alongside the orchard are lined with raspberries and blackberries.

The horses are scattered across the area in various pastures.