Important update and Changing Burrows #1!

 Hi folks! Amalia here. You may have noticed us miss another Sketchbook Saturday, yesterday. Well, we've got a good excuse!

You might recall that during our last Status Report, we mentioned that there was another death in the family. Well, out of respect for everyone involved, we don't wanna get into too much detail, but suffice it to say that Michael and i are in a position now where we inherited half a house and plan to move in, and are going to buy up the other half as well, for the purposes of either selling on as a condo or renting out as an apartment. (I mean, we'd have to. We can't just -buy- half a house out of pocket. Gotta have a solid plan to finance the whole thing.)

However, like most life-changing decisions, this comes with certain complications!

See, the house in question is Michael's childhood home, and until last autumn, it was occupied by his father and stepmother. Then, after Michael's father passed away, his stepmother remained and continued living in the house. Rather tragically, she too is now gone, so that period has come to an end at this point.

In turn, this has sparked a bunch of activity, because there's now about a million things that need taking care of. From insurance concerns, over re-establishing a maintenance schedule for the heating system to refitting of the electric meter box to separate top and bottom apartments.

And that's not even to mention all the concerns that come with filtering through the huuuuge amount of stuff that two people amassed over a lifetime. Every drawer and shelf is full of things. Some of them practical and still useful, some of them nostalgic and indisposable, but many of them are ultimately detritus that we'll have to dispose of, even if it feels pretty grim at times.

In fact, speaking of feeling a bit grim, i feel a bit off writing about this. Feels like Michael should be the one telling you, so i've asked him to take the front an continue from here.

Right, hi there, good people. Michael here. So yeah, as my better half has told you there, this past week we've been hit not only with tragedy, but also with a huge amount of sudden concerns that need to be taken care of.

The good news is that once this is all over (Hopefully by the end of the year!), we should be in a far better position in life. We'll be living rent-free in a place about twice the size of our current one, which also happens to be a ~7 minute walk from our workplace, so we'll save over an hour every day just in travel time.

It's also in a quiet neighbourhood and we won't have to deal with the insufferable louts we currently have to endure on a daily basis.

So yeah, it's ultimately a massive upgrade for us. Life-changing, even. But indeed, it'll take some time and dedication. Which is why we're writing this post. You see, this whole thing has taken our routines and plans and flummoxed them entirely.

And thus, our online presence is going to suffer quite a bit. Just simply because a good chunk of the time, we'll be staying over at our new home, sorting stuff out. Should get better over time, especially when we eventually get the internet sorted and get our computer over there. Mind you, we currently -do- have a connection via wifi over there, but it's on borrowed time. We're just using it while the bill's still paid, as it were.

We'll still be at our old apartment some of the time, and we'll try and sneak in some writing, drawing or game recording every now and then, but for a while, expect our content releases to slow down -a lot-. What we -will- do is to update you on the actual situation with the house from time to time, because well, it'll be the main thing we'll be doing, so what else are we gonna write about?😜

So actually, why don't i get started on that? Welcome to our new, circumstance-driven blog project:

Changing Burrows

Geddit? Because Wombat!

Just to catch you up, last week, we popped by the house after work (or indeed, during our lunch break) a few times, mainly to drop off a few things we'd need to "establish a beachhead" as it were. Some basic stuff we wanted to have around if we're gonna be staying overnight.

Along with that, we've also been eagerly gathering cardboard boxes at work, which we'll need huge amounts of, these next weeks.

Then, on Friday, we went to the house after work and stayed there, getting to work! First, we had to stumble through the dark basement in order to...... make it not dark. All the lightbulbs needed replacing and thankfully, we found some on the upper floors:

With the light in the basement re-established, we could go about finding a key to the basement door to lock it. It's been unlocked for years. Honestly, the fact that no one ever broke (or well, waltzed) in is a testament to how nice the neighbourhood is, but still, we'll sleep a lot better knowing that the external doors are actually locked and the building is secure.😉

The house is situated in such a way that during the heaviest of rainfalls, the basement might get flooded with a couple centimetres of water. Nothing cataclysmic, but enough to bring up some detritus that needs to be cleaned out. Well, this had happened at some point, and it'd been left to dry, which meant that we could just sweep it up:

Quite a chunky pile! Anyway, after that, we trimmed down some stuff in the overgrown garden, mainly just to make it easier to move around. The garden is definitely a part of the grounds we won't have the time/motivation to tend to, mind you, so that'll definitely be part of the "other" half of the house, the one we'll sell/rent out.

Anyway, after that, we found some food to chuck in the microwave (Not established enough to cook on-site yet, but there's plenty of frozen food, TV dinners etc. around, so we might as well use those up while we're staying over!), took a break and watched some YouTube.

With that done, we went upstairs and got started on what we had actually intended to do: Sorting out the attic!

I should clarify: We're not talking about a dusty old storage area. The attic is effectively a little studio apartment, with it's own bathroom, but minus a kitchen. And that means it was full of stuff!

So we started going through shelves, drawers and what have you. 2 things became clear quite quickly: There are entirely too many books, as well as entirely too many clothes, especially shoes.

We'll need to see if we can do some kind of a mass-donation with both.

The plan is to eventually rent a container to just toss all kinds of stuff into, but straight-up dumping so many perfectly good books and clothes seems.... wrong.

Also, if you know us, you might be wondering why we don't keep the books, being a fairly avid reader ourselves. Well, for one, they're all in German, which isn't generally our preferred language, but more than that, it's the -nature- of the books:

Giant, incredibly drab-looking book about World War I. Looks about as enticing as actually sitting in the trenches yourself. To be honest, this particular book was in the household ever since i was a child, and even back then, it intimidated me with how unenjoyable it looks. Kinda cathartic to share that feeling with you folks like this.

But our "favourite" was this:

This is a book about the county of  "Mies", which was a temporary county established in the annexed territory of Czechoslovakia during WW2.

It tells you a lot about the individual towns and villages within said county, down to details like who owns which lot, who's the village doctor, where do the children go to school and what have you.

Yes, we're being serious.

Now, being a blogger, we can appreciate that someone took the time to write about such a niche topic in such fine detail, but to be honest, in this era, it seems absolutely ridiculous that someone would make a book out of that. And well, frankly, the only reason we'd ever read this is is if we were stranded on a tropical island with literally nothing but this book for entertainment.

There's also plenty of books about dog-keeping. And while Amalia and i are very much a dog people, we wouldn't have the time to care for a woofer, so those books don't do anything for us, either.

So..... yeah. The idea of throwing away books still feels deeply wrong, but we'll stick with Warhammer 40k, Tom Clancy, Agatha Christie and whatnot, thank you. We'll see about donating the rest to libraries and such. Though hey, we're not through with all the books, so maybe we'll actually find a couple that we'll want to keep. Here's hoping!

Mind you, there's another thing we've inherited a lot of. Something we -won't- be giving away:

Tools. So. Many. Tools. We've made some amazing finds like this one above. Being a tradesman, i can really appreciate what an eye-wateringly nice collection this is. In the basement, we also have a couple of angle grinders (one of them being the chonky industrial variety!), a little circular saw and even a bench grinder. Tool-wise, we're amazingly well equipped, which could indeed come in very handy in the near future. Mind you, we also have some old, rusty stuff which -should- be disposed of, but they can't all be winners.

But yeah, digging our way through the attic, we found a while lot of..... stuff. Just all kinds of things. For instance, some decoration materials which Amalia really wanted to keep around, which is reasonable considering we'll be moving in ourselves and will want to pretty the place up a bit.

After working well into the evening on Friday, we called it a day. Wanted to sit out on the balcony and enjoy our new view of the sunset for a bit, but unfortunately, it turns out that wasps have occupied the chair on our balcony. And being a bit too insistent, Amalia got us stung. Ow.😶

...... her first time being stung like that, actually. Yay for new experiences?😜

Well anyway, we picked ourselves another thing to stuff in the microwave and had a nice evening, before getting up on Saturday and having a magically beautiful morning.

And i mean -magical-. We scavenged some breakfast, had some Assam tea that we brought along and went for a little walk, where i showed Amalia a lovely little spot with a bench, where we sat and smoked a pipe. Best pipe we had in years.

The town we've lived in for the past few years isn't huge or anything, but we're moving to a village with less than 2000 inhabitants. People here actually say good morning to each other. They're also generally not shifty or suspicious-looking, which is nice.

It's incredibly idyllic and quiet, even at the house. There's not some idiot blasting music at random hours of the day, nobody's coughing up their drug-addled lungs for half an hour every morning and you don't have to watch some grunting neighbours slav-squatting in the yard with beer cans in hand and cigarettes in their mouths.

I cannot tell you how happy we felt that morning, knowing that we'll be getting away from the cesspit of town life and escaping (back) into the quiet, beautiful countryside together. And yes, i feel pretty strongly about this. Excuse me for sounding a little dramatic.😉

Well, after that, we went back to work for a bit, and found some curiosities. Such as:

An unexpected George Washington! Not sure where it came from (or err, how it got here, at least.😜), but hey, we've never been to the 'states, so we'll keep this one as an interesting bit of decoration.

We also found something that i believe you still can't legally buy in the land of Mr. Washington and his colleagues:

Tucked away in a shoebox full of random stuff, wrapped up in a keep-fresh bag from a local supermarket, we found a cigar. And not some cheap petrol-station thing either, but a Cohiba, which is a rather premium Cuban brand! Quite a pleasant surprise for us, as an occasional cigar smoker. Been ages since we had a Cohiba too, and thankfully, despite being rather crude, the storage method was effective and it's still in decent condition, so we've taken it back with us and have put it in our little humidor. 'Course it's only a matter of time until the humidor is moving into the house with us, so it's a bit of a back and forth for that cigar.😛

Well, in general, we found loads and loads of stuff. Some of it funny, some of it useful, some of it disturbingly private and some of it painful to discard. Even some things from my own childhood turned up, some of which we'll keep for nostalgic decoration.

Amazingly, we found a sepia photo of my first year in school. Which is weird. I'm not -that- old. My first school year must have been ~'97 or '98 or so. We may have still used VCRs and very few people had a mobile phone, but come on, colour photography wasn't exactly new at that point.😉

Anyway, we were busy until mid-afternoon, when we pretty much finished going through the attic, having filtered everything into stuff to keep, stuff to donate, stuff to dispose of, and a few outliers that require special attention.

We made our way back to our current apartment at that point, with more things planned and on the agenda. We like making progress and we'll be staying at the house again for 2-3 days next week, but we do also cannot fully neglect our "current life", as it were. Also, we need more cardboard boxes from work. We've filled them all up.

Proofreading Amalia here. I just had a thought: How does moving work for people who don't work in a place where large, empty cardboard boxes are a by-product of unpacking materials? Do you have to buy cardboard boxes for this sort of thing?

Anyway!

Next up, we're planning to get the upstairs kitchen sorted out. The upstairs apartment is the one we're planning to move into and the kitchen is by far the most cluttered room in it, so once we can get that sorted and turn it into a functional kitchen for ourselves, we'll "unlock" the ability to -live- a bit more properly when we're staying over at the house, actually cooking ourselves proper meals and what have you. Still gonna be scavenging for a while, just because there's an absolute ton of frozen food on-site and there's no point just letting it sit there, but it'll be a good step forward.

Anyway, we'll tell you about it! But before we finish up, there's one thing i've saved up here, because it's one of the coolest things we've found in the attic.

Check this bad boy out:

How's -that- for vintage vibes?😎

This thing is, of course, a remnant of my grandparents. It's a proper vacuum tube radio, with EQ settings and all. Honestly, it might even still work, but with the flimsy cable coming out the back, i'm worried we'd set the house on fire if we tried.😅

Might even be worth something to a vintage collector, but nuh-uh, this is a gorgeous centrepiece for the sort of music-and-art studio we wanna turn the attic into! So that's definitely a keeper.

..... also, isn't it a shame how we don't design things like that, anymore? It's such a genuinely nice thing to look at!

But yeah, that'll be it for this post.

Again, we'd love to try and sneak in some gaming and stuff from time to time, and -maybe- we'll manage to squeeze out another post in our Hitman or Snowrunner series in the coming month or two, but to be perfectly honest, it's probably best if you consider all our other projects effectively paused until we're reasonably established in our new house. Even then, we'll be busy with the whole business of renting out/selling the lower apartment and garden, but once we're properly -living- there, we should gradually find more time to work on other projects, again.

In the meantime, we hope you'll at least find some joy in this little log we're going to keep of the project! So until our next post, stay safe, don't stuff your shelves with books about random Czechoslovakian counties, and have a good one!😉