House work back home

Blog Post About June 2021

While I was moving every three days in America to a different location, Doug was busy with work and construction on the house.

He hired some guys to build up a wall on our roof so that it would be the height of a door. 

That way, he could put a roof and a door on and give us a storage room.

This is the lot next to our house. It also looks through, past another empty lot, to another street.

This is where the builders put their supplies and cement bags.  As a matter of fact, today it's seven months later, and there is still a pile of dirt out there that didn't get used to make cement.

After all the supplies were delivered, they started hauling cement bags up to the roof...through our living area.

The opening on the left is where we walk up stairs to our roof. 

These guys are building up the wall, so that a door can be put in that opening.

Here is their pile of cement they are using.

The slow-down occurred when this crew got Covid. They stopped work for a while, and didn't complete it for three more months, in September. 

And if you read my newsletter, you remember the dabacle with the next crews that were hired to spackel the walls. 

The first crew asked me to feed them breakfast and then serve tea throughout the day. When we saw they weren't working and a foreman working for us finally fired them, they came back later while the second crew was there and made all kinds of threats until the police were called.

When the wall finally got spackeled, then a roof crew came, and then finally a door guy (not quickly, of course).

Around November, we were finally able to see the floor in this room, because...

All of this stuff was finally able to be moved to this new storage area.

ALSO, while the roof was being worked on, Doug hired a guy to put screens on our windows and door (You would have to look many hours to find a screen on a window in this country - the rare).

If you remember our first house where we lived by a chicken butcher, you remember the number of flies we dealt with. Feel free to click on the link to be grossed out.

Now we have screens!!

ALSO, Doug had to order another water truck to come to the house. This was about the time one of the neighbors realized the pipes weren't bringing water to the neighborhood. 

A neighbor contacted the government, and the government arranged for the problem to be fixed. While the street was dug up and pipes replaced, Doug sat outside with all of the men on the street while they watched and ate ice cream :)

Water is a precious gift.

We found it, Now let's Move!

There were no commercial flights arriving or departing from our country, but occasionally a charter flight would come available. When one did, Doug booked Karis, Keira, and me on it. We were going to leave June 21, 2020, so we could get Karis back in time to quarantine for two weeks before she went to ballet camp. And since the chartered flights were more expensive, only half of us flew, while Doug waited to see if the airport would open up and he could get something cheaper for the rest of them.

Two days before we left, on June 19, 2020, we found a rental that fit what we needed!

 

Perfect timing, too, because on June 20, 2020, Doug had already hired movers to come and get our belongings to take to storage.

We still went with this plan because we knew the new rental would need to be cleaned before we moved into it, and since we were going to be in America for about 6 months, we didn't want to clean it and have it sit and collect dust while we were gone.

You've heard the term, "It takes a village?"

Well, we took the village and we used them.

A friend who had been stuck in our country for quite a few months because of Covid offered to be at our house while the movers wrapped and packed everything into the truck.

Then I was on the other end of the truck, at the storage house. 

I showed the men the three rooms we were allowed to move into, and I made sure they stacked things well.

So instead of a stacking job looking like this, I would kindly ask someone to make it look like

this.  And so on.

Then, another friend was with me to translate. The movers spoke a language that I do not know.

In the meantime, our first friend stayed at the original house for most of the day while the truck went back and forth.

During all of this, Doug was at the police station in our new neighborhood, registering us to live there. There was a lot of waiting around and moving to different buildings for different pieces of paper. It was almost 4 hours before he ever made it to the storage house.

And our children had taken our need-to-live items (including all of the suitcases that would be going to America) and moved us into a guest house for the time being.

Then, at the end of the day, I took the girls back to the house we were leaving and let them take pictures in their old bedroom they had shared.

Ahhh...now to get all the luggage weight right so we some of us can get on the plane tomorrow.

Americans and their storage

Our crates arrived back in June, but we weren't sure if we had any projects around the house that needed the wood from them, so they remained on the carport intact.

Doug decided we could make them into storage. They were already half built, right?

He built two piano dollies (that project alone took a whole day because he had to find wood and wheels in town), and then he bought cinder blocks. I only assisted him a little, and my strong man moved the crates and put them up on blocks. That all took place in August.

Last week, he bought materials for framing, a door, a covering, etc.

He attached three of our crates together, and cut doors in the two walls. You can see the doors right here, if you know what you are looking at. Kylie's head is "in" one.

Once our inverter gets here from the States, we will be able to put the final wall on.

That seems funny, but the wood for the walls is on top of the roof covering the solar panels. We were told it's not good for the panels to be getting full sun when they aren't able to charge the batteries.

The crazy thing is that we don't have that much stuff, but yet, storage is needed. Why do Americans always seem to have more than enough - us included?

We are going to put suitcases, bicycles, and empty boxes from unpacking out here so that our "garage" that was originally going to be a school room can be an office, of sorts. The kids prefer to do school in the living room.

So here we are, in Africa, representing America well with our "storage shed."