Sunday, 4th of July 2021. We packed all our things from grandma’s house and moved permanently into our „work-in-progress“ house. It is a bit of a trade-off but still we thought it is worth it. Our house is not ready, by far not but still it made sense at this point.
What do you really need for living? Fancy kitchen with touch devices, automatic doors with finger print locks, 7.1 sorround system with some smart TV, washing machine with WIFI…the answer is no. For our basic living needs a few things were essential:
That‘s it. Everything else is luxus.
Everything else is luxus.
We may call ourselves lucky that our house has a second floor with two rooms that are ready for (summer) use and two big attic areas. While we will still renovate them for the longterm use, it is currently more than enough for our needs. This way we can keep doing renovation work downstairs and have a separated, more-or-less dust-free living area upstair and we even save all the driving between grandma’s house and the construction site.
The center of our temporary house is this room. We assembled the fridge that was left in this house together with the tumble drier to form a kind of kitchen area. Some old table top from our freshly bought used kitchen would serve as working area. And next to it we arranged the old electric stove that came with the house. Not in it’s best years but still functional.
Then we still assembled all kind of furniture that we had or found in this house for our purpose:
That’s it – nothing special but still working.
But hey – where is the sink, right?
Ready for it? Right next to the kitchen we had an unused hidden room in the attic. We had already prepared water and waste water pipes to come from downstairs to this room as we had the idea of making it an upstairs toilet at some point. So why not use it as our “room with water”?
Very very rustic look but still working for summer: Our toilet/sink/washing room. We assembled the toilet on a small podest and put the sink and tap right in front. That way it was easy to connect water and waste water pipes to downstairs. For the nicer look and for more convenience we taped the wooden floor with simple artificial grass carpet. It is nice to walk barefoot and keeps the floor a bit warmer.
Above the tap and sink you can find the shelve from the old kitchen of this house. Like the finnish standard, this shelves has a drying compartment for the dishes which is super handy.
All the rest of the room is used as temporary storage for miscellaneous stuff (vacuum cleaner, trashes etc.)
Last but not least we needed a place to sleep. Well, there is still one room to use.
For our temporary home in grandma’s house we bought two bunk beds to be able to utilize space efficiently for sleeping. Exactly those two beds fit perfectly into our second/third room and make space for 4 people sleeping. For the smallest one we added another small kids bed to the right side that we brought from Austria.
In the middle of the right side you can find the TV that came with the house and behind it there are some old shelves for toys and random stuff.
That’s it for our temporary apartment at the moment. Everything else is luxus.
But wait, there is one thing missing, right? Where is the shower?
Currently there was no easy way to install a shower inside of the house. So we installed one outside, in the garden – a garden shower.
Right, that is pretty idyllic and basic but serves our needs. The downside: only cold water. On a warm summer day the sun warms up the water tank inside and you can shower with nicely warm water. On overcast or cold days? Only cold water.
So we better be fast with installing a proper shower inside the house to be able to use also warm water in the shower. Because let’s be honest: Showering on a cold day with cold water is not that much fun. Healthy for your body but not that much fun.
Quick hint: If we need to use it longer then I could image mixing cold and warm water inside the house (installing a tap) and then going outside to the shower with the mixed water instead of cold water only.
Does not look extremely exciting, right? But actually that is almost everything you (or we) essentially need for living at the moment. And I will repeat it another time: Everything else is luxus.
So stay connected to get updates about how and when we are able to “upgrade” our home and life to the more “normal” – or just “the other normal” way of living.
