"You guys live in BFE!"

Here are some snow bells I found in our yard today. I know, White Horse Pilgrim already talked about them popping up in England, but I'm in Europe too, and I wanted to share. They're just precious. Look, they're growing up around the new plastic step-in posts I just put up to mark where our wood fence will be near our barn.

I know I said when we bought the house it didn't need renovation; it had been renovated recently, but somehow we're finding ways to fix it up in the massive amount of time we have until we actually live there. (OK, 2 weeks now!)

Somehow I got jinxed into painting YET ANOTHER room. Agh. This was because of a special church service today where my man's choir sung, and he had to be there. I was free. Agh. But tomorrow the floor man comes, and you don't want to paint over newly installed floors, I know that! So get this - I spent *5* hours painting our bedroom today. 5 HOURS! I'm so done with painting.

But first, yesterday. My man's cousin came to install the texturing on the walls - uh, let me explain. In Germany, most walls are concrete, and rough, and instead of drywalling, they usually just put up a textured paper to look like drywalling.



This is the cousin's specialty, and he showed up at 8:05 am Saturday to do the bedroom walls, which we'd stripped of wallpaper down to bare concrete (and later I'd used an acrylic prep liquid on, to get them ready for the texture stuff - that was a miserable, sticky wet job).

Here's what the textured paper looks like when it's up.





So dingdong our new doorbell rings and I happily run to answer it. The cousin says, "You guys live in BFE!" I stared at him blankly, not knowing this expression yet. My man explained it later. In Germany, they say you live in this particular Russian town when you live way out in the country. In America, we say Bum-Frak-Egypt, or, BFE. Cool, I didn't know there was an expression for BFE in Germany!

Actually, I think it's really cool that someone vising us complained that we live in BFE. I mean, heck, I've waited my whole life to live in BFE!

The cousin was a little annoyed that I kept snapping photos as he worked, but I'd never seen anything like this. He has this big long table with this rolling machine at the end. He runs the textured paper thru it, and it gets soaked in a liquid paste. He folds the strips neatly until they're ready to hang. Fascinating!

I was finishing up painting our living room, good grief, that took me forever! Now it's done. As a surprise, my man found the perfect light fixtures and brought some of them to the house and installed them. They're energy saving lights, and actually too bright so we would never turn them all on, unless we wanted to film some television from our living room! (There are 4 light fixtures in our living room, thankfully we have different switches for each).

Oh, I almost forgot - our new roman blinds arrived - I put them up and was a little shocked at how bed-sheety they are, they seem cheap, but I think I like them. They are the ultimate in unobtrusive curtains.



They're almost not even there.




My man went to take care of his fish and he tried on his new rubber boots he got at the hardward store. "Wait!" I called, "You look like my farmer husband with those boots on - I need a photo!" so he smiled for me.






We discovered a dead trout, and he fished it out. I think it died of old age cuz my goodness look how huge that thing is! It's the size of a salmon. I think it's a rainbow trout cuz it has a red stripe down its side. It's taking up the whole bucket.











Later I heard a funny gurgly noise coming from a radiator and told him. He said "uh oh..." and went to the furnace. In Germany, people heat their homes with hot water. Weird, huh? Hot water runs thru all the pipes and radiators. It's a cozy slow heat, not at all dispersed like the natural gas-forced air heaters backhome. Note my cute little box-trees (? in Germany, buchsbaum) in the windowsill: ) I love how there's this big window in our shower, looking over the fields.


Anyway, I got another opportunity to be super impressed by my man, as he fixed our heaters by hooking them up to our garden hose (they were low on water, and had too much air in the system). He used a pair of scissors with a nutcracker attachment to do this, because we don't have the right tool yet. He also used a cookie tin to catch the excess water. I was the useless photo-journalist.
Today, Sunday, I got the bedroom painted in advance of the carpet man who comes tomorrow morning. This is the same room that the cousin put up the texture in yesterday, that was bare concrete the day before. Had to work fast! I'm so exhausted. We picked out a cowardly shade of tan/grey for the bedroom carpet - a color that really goes with anything, and I have mostly brown/navy comforter covers so this brown theme should really look good, whether we get a new bed or not. (Ours is grey, but we plan on buying a birch IKEA set soon.)


I was a little surprised to see how dark the brown was when it hit the wall today, I call it "Ritter Sport Chocolate Brown" but I think it's gonna be perfect. It was a real trick getting those edges straight. From now on, I'll be less critical of people who paint a wall a different color, and can't seem to get that line straight. Yeesh, that's hard, when the wall itself isn't even straight!

We are so blessed - we went to the flooring store and found remnants for both the bedoom and kitchen. The bedroom is a berber, and the kitchen is a linoleum that looks like grey paving stones, irregularly shaped so it should be simple to install. Get this, both the rug and linoleum were marked down half off, so we got both for 280 Euros. What a blessing! And my man's cousin only asked for 60 Euros to do the bedroom walls!

It's getting so much better, and soon we'll actually be there!