Some Nuts and Bolts (and a hand saw)

We have been living in our new city for four weeks! The last few weeks have been frustrating and exciting, sometimes feeling both emotions on the same day.

We arrived in our city in the middle of the night and spent a few hours sleeping at our coworkers’ house. When the moving truck driver called around 9 am, we met him at our house to find no windows, no doors, and many other unfinished things around the flat. Many thoughts went through our mind: Why isn’t our flat completed when we agreed upon this date? What is taking them so long to finish the work? Where will we put our stuff? Will our stuff be safe? When will enough work be done so that we can move in?

Some of the guys in our living room sawing and working away on our window frames. (We're so ready for wood chips and dirt to be out of our house; we've lived here long enough to feel weird wearing shoes in our own house! We normally have a leave your shoes at the door policy.)

Luckily, our coworkers were really gracious and allowed us to stay in their spare bedroom for two weeks. Everyday during the past few weeks, Grayson would wake up and go sit at our unfinished flat watching about 7 guys use about 5 handsaws, 1 drill, and other very rustic looking tools hand make all of the wood windows (which are double, one on the outside with glass and one on the inside with mosquito netting). In a place where the key to accomplishing anything with people here is “to sit on their head” until they complete their work well, Grayson oversaw the painters, the electricians, and the other random workers that were in and out, making sure they were doing things well and not taking too many “chai” breaks.

It’s been slow and difficult wanting to move into our place for the last few weeks and continuing to hear from different workers, “We’re coming this afternoon,” and then not see them for several days.

We hit a speed bump when our landlords who live below us noticed a leak, so they dug up our completely finished guest bathroom to fix the leak. (Still waiting on the plumber to fill this back in..)

Grayson has been itching for our home to be finished and frustrated with workers not working very much. So he took up a paintbrush and has been helping them paint, not only to make the work go faster but also to encourage the workers to work more.

For the past two weeks we have gone to sleep in our bedroom (with plywood over the window and a lock on the door to the outside of our room) and woken up and got ready for the day to Hindi music blaring outside our door since the painters show up around 8:30 every morning. They have been painting everything from our walls to every single door and window in our house. They have been the ones in charge of sanding and varnishing all of our wood doors and windows—which from pictures you can tell there are A LOT. We absolutely love how light and airy our home is, but sometimes we wish it wasn’t at the cost of more work being done to cover those openings! Anyone else who has had work done on the inside of their house can certainly feel the annoyance of having your house in disarray and people working in your home everyday.

Just recently our screen windows have been put in about half of our windows and the frames for the glass windows have been put in with hinges. It’s a little bit different here; there is not just one contractor who oversees the work. There are guys who do the carpentry, another group of guys who do the painting and varnishing, other ones who make the safety grills for our windows, and still others who come and put the glass in the windows. Can you say LOTS of working parts?

So excited that our mosquito net windows have been going in along with doors! Without these, we have been fighting swarms to cook our dinner every night.

 Besides watching the work slowly happen in our home, we’ve been stocking our pantry while learning what food items we can buy from different stores around town. Different stores have different things that we want here. We have a few places that are about the size of a small gas station grocery store that make our life easier to buy groceries from. We will no longer take for granted a grocery shopping experience where we can take a cart (semi)leisurely down the aisles and buy fixed price items that we don’t have to worry about haggling for at the end.

We’ve also been slowly acquiring much-needed items for our home. (When you rent a place in this country, it generally comes bare bones with windows and doors.) We’ve had to purchase everything from a refrigerator to our hot water heater in our bathroom. So after price checking different places, purchasing, and installing things like hot water heaters, a week has rushed by!

We are finally settling more into our kitchen as we slowly unload boxes, wash our previously-packed dishes, and find new homes for our kitchen things.

We are currently in the market for some furniture since we are upgrading from a one-bedroom/one living room/outdoor kitchen apartment to a two room/two bedroom/indoor kitchen place (but downgrading in price!). Our flat is SO empty right now and not in a place to host our new friends. I really can’t wait for the day when our house is finished enough for me to have my lady friends over for chai and good talks! My love for hospitality is really “chompin at the bit” to host people in our home!

One thing we LOVE about our new city is the friendliness of all the people around us. We no longer get lost (and ignored) in a crowd full of tourists like we were in the capital city; here so many people stop us, talk to us, and invite us to their homes.

On a more shallow note, we love our new neighborhood because it is so QUIET (minus your occasional cow loudly mooing outside our gate) and more open with trees and beautiful animals. Grayson reminds me that he was so worried when we moved to this country because he is a man who experiences the Lord in nature and open spaces, and he thought he was going to be sentenced to busy alleyways with no trees and open spaces. However, we can see how the Lord is watching out for him because our first home had a great park just five minutes away; our second home’s porch looked out over our cul-de-sac’s personal park; and now our home has palm trees outside it with several empty lots outside it to add to the openness. We are so glad to have back our access to a roof. I don’t know many things at this point in our life that can beat watching the sunset almost nightly from your roof (I’ll have to give my dad the credit for teaching me to appreciate sunsets.)

About a week ago when we were longing for our house to be sealed!

We didn't take this, but we see these guys around our neighborhood weekly! So cool.

Four weeks. Wow. We’ve been settling in well here, only every now and then missing our life in the capital. But we are excited about what is in store for us in this city. We know the opportunity to experience and struggle through all these new things is only from the Lord. It really can be a blessing to live a little more uncomfortably for a short while. Somehow there is a “sweet spot” that exists there. And we are thankful for every blessing God bestows on us.

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