We had our housewarming party here on Saturday night and although it was a lot of fun, we’re both happy to have it behind us now. We ended up with about 50 guests and around 15 children ranging in age from a few weeks to 5 years old. Nearly everyone who said they’d be attending made it here and a few that we didn’t invite too…but I’ll come back to that later.

One of the things which was really essential for this party was lots of planning and to do lists for us to keep track of everything which we wanted and needed to get done before people started arriving. I’d already made the chili earlier in the week and made muffins and the pasta salad on Friday so there were a few less things to worry about on party day. I also thought about making brownies but since Stefan’s mom brought a very tasty Sacher torte (a very rich chocolate cake) I decided against it. She prepared potato soup on Friday, too, and we only needed to put a few finishing touches on it on Saturday. That just left sandwiches, the veggie platter, a meat and cheese platter and fresh salad to deal with and plenty of hands to make everything. We cut off a few more things from our food list such as the tomato & mozzarella platter (our tomatoes unfortunately weren’t finished) and cut down the size of the anitpasto platter too…plus we stuck with potato soup and chili and dropped the gazpacho and leek soup from the menu. We just determined it was too much work, it would have been far too much food and we still ended up with plenty in the end…but this also helped us get a much better idea of what is needed for parties to come!

A few friends arrived on Friday evening so we had a few extra hands around to help during the day which was very nice. On Saturday morning at 9:45 am, our kitchen looked like this. Kind of a war zone and I was extremely thankful to have so much counter space around…not to mention our huge fridge. Without the latter, this party would have been massively more difficult, if not impossible.

By 12:45 all the beer tables were set up in the courtyard, the keg was ready to be tapped and we started putting some finishing touches on everything outside just to make it looks a bit nicer. It really felt like we had our very own beer garden out there. If we owned the tables I probably would have suggested we leave at least two of them up for a while longer…but since we’ll be building an outdoor table at some point anyway, at least we have a few more ideas of where to put it.

We actually ended up with some time to spare and Stefan’s parents decided to help beautify our courtyard a bit more with flowers that they not only bought for us during the course of the day – but planted for us as well.

By 1:45 we’d finished up all the food trays that we could feasibly prepare ahead of time like the veggie platter, slicing of the deli meat and so on…and only needed to make the sandwiches, cut up a few loaves of bread, put everything out and make a few more finishing touches to things. So we decided to take a break and get ready to party ourselves.

Before the party started, I managed to remember to take a few photos, especially of the food. We set up most of the food on our dining room table and had the soups on the stove. Most items were self-serve but my in-laws did help serve the soup and drinks…and kept on eye on the stockpiles too.

Here’s the courtyard before everyone started arrived – only Stefan and a few of our helpers there already. I suggested we put up the umbrella to shade the drink glasses and beer tap since the guys had been using a cool, wet rag to help cool it down – considering it’s black plastic and the sun was just beaming down on it. We weren’t sure if the umbrella would make it since the dog decided to do her best to eat it a few months back – but once it was open we couldn’t even tell it was broken 🙂

I took this photo from our bathroom upstairs – wish I had thought to do that later on in the evening as well! We had 10 disposable cameras out on tables and hope we may get a few decent photos from them. Some of the kids there decided to use them as toys so we’re sure to have plenty of useless photos from them too…but we’ll soon see.

One of our neighbors came over before the party began to let us know they wouldn’t be able to make it to the party. But they brought us this lovely plant (palm/yucca variation? – they had no idea what it is either) which we thought was extremely nice. Actually one of the really great things about housewarming parties is that you often get a lot of plants and I am always up for that! In addition to this plant we got a banana tree, an orchid (it will be interesting to see how we fare with this since I’ve never tried raising one although I always kinda wanted too) and two new fruit bushes for our garden. They are a cross between currents and gooseberries and you can make schnappes from the fruit…although I’m not 100% certain what they’re called. We also got a generous gift card to Hornbach from Stefan’s colleagues at work and quite a few bottles of wine to add to our collection in the cellar. And of course many loaves of bread and bags of salt which is a traditional German gift to bring luck and prosperity to a new home.

We didn’t really have the time to do much decorating outside the house but we were happy to find a way to mount the lantern outside our gate. You can barely see it here but if you click on the photo and enlarge it, you should be able to notice it on the left by our neighbor’s house.

All in all it was a great party, at least in our opinion. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves; well, almost everyone. The widow of the previous owner came back to the house for the first time in about 1.5 years and she apparently didn’t find our renovations to her liking…but the rest of her family loved it (did I mention she invited about 7 additional people to accompany her??) She wandered all over the house (without really asking us) and took some sort of mental inventory of everything we’ve done. We know it was painful for her to give up the house and that she didn’t really want to sell it – but she also knew that she couldn’t do the upkeep herself (and admitted it to us) and couldn’t stand being in the house without her husband – so we found her foul attitude rather unnerving. Thankfully she didn’t stay long…and her son-in-law told us some stories about the huge parties they used to throw in the house and a few renovation stories which I’ll try to detail later.

Oh, and we ended up not having any implications over the mirror and cabinet which we were very happy about. In fact, the son and daughter of the previous owner (step-kids of the unhappy widow) seemed to like what we’ve done as well and were really happy to see we’d kept many things like the big lantern outside which was built just for the lantern festival (which I will be posting more about very soon!)