Dear Family and Friends,
Well, it’s taken a while but that cold has been finally beaten! Just in time for Advent, too, I might add.
This is my favorite time of year. I love Christmas and have learned to combine my American traditions with those of Bavaria and just a pinch of Austrian thrown in (just to throw people off). This has given us a holiday season that is just all that is cozy, inspirational and peaceful despite so much going on.
Despite everything working against me, I have managed to get most of my Christmas cards in the mail. If I forgot anyone, it is because I have misplaced (of all things) my address book with all my friends and family addresses. Working off of what I could find has been… challenging. But I know that I will have things set up better next year.
I also managed to get up an Advent calendar for Thomas. It also is not perfect and up to what I usually make, but it is the best that I could come up with this year. “Yay!” for small successes.
So here I sit, with the Christmas tree lights glowing, the Advent wreath candles lit; the scent of hot chocolate and Christmas cookies in the air. I am just starting one of my Christmas movies and am getting ready to write you.
It is hard to believe that it is 10 days to Christmas! Our company is closing for the holidays (as a lot of German companies do) so we will have 2 weeks off between Christmas and Epiphany. We should get a lot of work done in those 2 weeks, despite the holiday activities we also have planned.
Working Vacation
We also took a week off the week before last. In that time, we were able to knock out a lot of the projects I listed last month. We (OK, Thomas and his dad, primarily—but I did help a lot) completed the drywalling of the ceilings in the master bedroom, the stairwell and around the attic access stair. I started the mudding process. That might not seem like much, but the stairwell involved building a temporary floor across the stairwell and securing it.
Before we started, I was responsible for creating a list and making sure that we had everything in place. Thomas was going to do the heavy lifting, so I wanted to do what I could beforehand. Actually, we were planning on doing this the two of us, but his Dad asked if he could help and let’s admit it—he is stronger than I am.
Our list consisted of the list I posted last month. We managed to get things 80% done. The insulation is up, the ceilings are finished, and even the ceiling access has been inserted. Thomas managed to finish the drywalling around the opening by himself while I was mudding.
In that way, we managed to get everything done except for the attic insulation.
Before mudding, I scraped down the walls of our bedroom, swept them and the ceiling edges down and used building primer to prime all the edges to prep them for the mudding process. That slowed things up a bit. Honestly, though, I think I was just too nervous about starting the project. Despite all that, I managed to finish patching the drywall and the first layer of mudding.
The changes are amazing, however!
Just look:
Plans & Changes
We didn’t complete all our projects because we had a few spontaneous changes to our plans. Thursday we were called in to check out a plan for our future kitchen. We ultimately decided we could not commit to the plans quite yet, but we have a great starting point to go from.
Thomas also had the chance to go see a heating system with the neighbor. They left early Friday morning and traffic kept them from coming home until late that afternoon. I was able to get a lot of the mudding figured out and done.
O Tannenbaum
On the weekend, we made it a point to go pick up a Christmas tree. German’s decorate trees traditionally on Christmas Eve, but this is one American tradition I am thankful to have room to do. I love our tree and it will be up for the rest of the Advent season, Christmas, New Years until Epiphany on the 6th of January.
I love Christmas trees and Thomas loves me, so that’s that. He actually makes an effort for me to have my tree—and it is the perfect gift every time.
We found the perfect (for us) tree and I spent the better part of the afternoon and evening decorating it. Which brought us to the end of our vacation week. With a lot of projects upstairs nearing completion and Advent and Christmas filling the downstairs. (Thomas’ Dad even brought us a pre-selection of the Christmas cookies to “taste test”.)
Things are coming together.
