We’ve been on vacation for the last week and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. No vacation can be completely without mishaps and ours certainly wasn’t. Before we left last Thursday, we found out that a storm was hitting the coast of Holland where we were traveling. Since we were staying on an island which is reachable only via ferry, we were rather concerned how we’d reach our destination. Thankfully the seas had settled before we arrived and we didn’t run into any problems. But Tuesday we picked up a nail in one of our tires and because we have those new-fangled “run flat tires,” there was no spare. Naturally there was no service place on the island so we had to travel 5 hours round trip to have the tire replaced. Joy. Our trip home was no less exciting when the tire puncture warning came on again…but it seems to be that the sensor has just come loose. At any rate, just another thing to do this week.
But enough of that rant…It was hard to leave with the guest house still unfinished but since we made great progress last Thursday before we left, we figured we could still go away without guilty consciouses. I have some further photos to publish here later but basically the wall outside the wine cellar to form the closet was finished up Thursday evening and the plumbing is all mounted and ready to be covered with drywall now. Covey is coming tomorrow morning to take care of that & then we’ll just be left with the closet framing & drywalling before we can have the screed for the floor brought in.
We picked up our new shower fixtures today from Hagebau and are really excited to be putting all the pieces together. Of course we still have a lot to do before we can put those on the wall but the feelings that we just might get this thing finished are definitely increasing.
We’ve got a lot to accomplish this week like ordering tile and finally having someone come service our heater. We also have quite a bit to do regarding Thanksgiving including lots of food shopping and house cleaning. Although it’s not a holiday in Germany, we still love to celebrate it. This will actually be the first year we’ve done anything for Thanksgiving ourselves since we’ve either done something totally untraditional in the past (like sushi lol) or just gone to a friend’s house where they were do all the cooking. But we decided it would be nice to give things a try ourselves this year and see how it goes. We have 8 friends coming over with 2 kids but I come from a Southern family so I can’t imagine we’ll come anywhere close to having a food shortage. We’re celebrating on Saturday since it will be much easier with our friends’ schedules but we will have one friend here already Wednesday night already. Hopefully he’ll be reading this and know we’ll be putting him to work soon lol…
So since I don’t have access to the photos of the guest house progress right now, I’ll post an idea I came across for Thanksgiving table decorations.BHG.com talks about this idea here in which they use sprigs of rosemary and florist’s wire to create napkin rings. I unfortunately don’t have tons of rosemary in my garden…but I do have tons of lavender and think this would work beautifully with that as well. Inexpensive & elegant – just the way I like it.
