Home Makeover

Our new house is nice. We look around at the majority of our neighbors, see the numerous tin roofs and shacks made of dried mud and are grateful for the living space that we have. But it is a change from what we knew. Central heating and air? A fading memory. Basements and 2nd floors? Not here. The windows are from 40 years ago, the tiled floors as well. But it does have an open feeling, especially between the living and dining rooms. The bedrooms are spacious enough as well. This is a 40 year old split level pre-fabricated house that was probably the shining diamond of the neighborhood when it was built. Buzzers in each room to ring the servants. But in 40 years the shining diamond has lost its luster. For whatever reason, we have been given the job of a house makeover.

We were given encouragement to make changes this year by outgoing CR’s John and Holly. It makes sense to do things right as you are moving in. Everybody knows that once you are settled in a place it becomes difficult to make changes. So where do we start? First thing that happened to us was the plumbing got stopped up. Someone put toilet paper in the toilet instead of putting it in the waste basket. This may seem like a silly thing to worry about but anyone who has had a toilet back up on them knows the annoyance of an overflowing toilet. That has finally cleared up. Then it was our hot water heater for our shower. It was overheating. We were getting steam from the faucets in our master bathroom. Pipes were warping under the intense heat. So a new water heater was installed. John saw to that before he left. There isn’t much water pressure and the hot/cold adjustment is microsensitive (you move it 1mm in a direction and either freeze or get scalded), but we are grateful for warm water. We found some old ceramic space heaters and now use one for our bathroom in the morning to take the chill off when we shower and get ready. We also bought a standup radiator-like heater (like the one we had in our house in St. Catharines) to stay warm in the evening when we hang out in the living room.

There was some fixing to do. Broken windows to be replaced. Doors that wouldn’t shut unless you slammed them so hard the house would shake (one time the guard came running to see what the noise was about). Finally they were planed and now all close quickly and quietly in the evening when I need to lock up. The sink finally has a drain catch and plug (one had to be quite careful, I dropped my toothbrush down the drain and feared I couldn’t get it out of the long piping, but I did. Wanda worried about dropping rings and other things down the open hole). It’s the little things we are grateful for. I also did some major cleaning out, rearranging and organizing of shelves. Do you know how stuff accumulates in corners over the years? I do because we just experienced that in moving from our house in St. Catharines. Well some of this stuff looked like it hadn’t been moved in 40 years. It felt good to pull out stuff from closets, drawers and shelves, weed out the old and useless stuff and reorganize the stuff that still held some value. I did that for the MCC Ethiopia library and the games we found here.

Then there was the matter of entertainment. Sure we have the MCC Ethiopia library in our house and that has been wonderful for the girls and us. I’ve already read The Sign and the Seal, a book about whether the Ark of the Covenant actually is here in Ethiopia by Graham Hancock (I highly recommend it!) and I read the first two Harry Potter books. I am plowing through David Lamb’s The Africans. The girls have found Peanuts and Garfield the Cat books. All that is good. We also play games. We’ve played Monopoly, Mastermind, Pit, Rook, Dutch Blitz and others. Still, being North Americans, we missed our TV. The previous CR’s apparently bought and sold their TV’s in the past. We decided to buy a TV and DVD player for MCC Ethiopia and finally settled on a Phillips 21” flat screen TV and a Phillips DVD player. Our friends from the Danish Mission have lent us stacks of DVD’s they bought off the street (are they pirated? Don’t ask . . .) and we have been enjoyed some films we missed seeing over the recent years.

But the biggest renovation/changes are yet to come. We are planning to have new cabinets and cupboards installed in the kitchen. The current ones could be as old as the house. Laminated countertops that have warped and pealed with water and age. People have hammered them down with tiny nails but still they rise. Drawers no longer open. So we are currently taking bids by recommended cabinet makers. We want to do the same for the tiles. Many are chipped and cracked. Of course this all costs money but the good news is that the materials and labor cost about 10% or less of North American prices. We hope to have all the bids in and to have picked out what we want done before we go to South Africa for an MCC CR conference at the end of September. The hope is to have the workmen come in when we are gone that week and that we would miss the mess of installation.

The other thing is lighting. Today we are having two ceiling lights installed in our dining room and living room. It took us a couple of afternoons going through numerous light shops before settling on one we liked. We bought two, one for each room. Lighting for each room previously consisted of a single bulb. The corners of the rooms were in darkened states. Reading in the living room wasn’t easy on the eyes (I can remember as I was growing up, my dad would come into the room and say, much to my annoyance, “You need more light on what you are reading.” And now I say it to my daughters, much to their annoyance.), so these new lights will alleviate that.

It is exciting to see all the changes. Still, a house makeover isn’t the same as a home makeover. That will take time. But I believe it will happen. We will become used to living here. We will become used to shopping here. To getting around here. But one’s house needs to become a home if one is to feel stable and secure enough to venture out and meet the challenges of a different culture. And it is happening, step by step . . .