Turning our House into a Home: The First Week at Site, September 23 - October 1

As we mentioned earlier in the site visit post, we had fortunately been given an entire house to live in for the next two years. The house belonged to gogo, who passed away in January of this year, in which Esther and her brothers grew up. Although the house is the biggest we have lived in as a couple, it was, and still is in need of major repairs. Fortunately we had time to do a lot of the fixing-up during our first week at site due to a week long school break. After asking for Ma’s permission, we decided not to waste any time and got right down to business.
The first project was removing the drop ceilings (a plaster board ceiling that covers the tin roof) in the hallway and kitchen. Due to holes in the tin roof, the hallway ceiling had turned black with mold and the kitchen ceiling was beginning to buckle under the weight of water and debris. After borrowing some tools from our neighbors and removing the light fixtures, Joe attacked the ceilings with a large pick axe. It was both scary and exhilarating to see large pieces of the ceiling fall to the floor along with years worth of dust, scat and dead animals. Yes, we discovered at least two rotting corpses in the ceiling along with a milk container- don’t ask us how it got there! Once the ceilings and supports were torn down, we began the task of removing the layers of dust, dirt and scat, dead animals, and chunks of ceiling from the house. We have an old shed in our back yard which we have turned into a dumpster. The shed is now almost full with the remains of our ceiling.

After removing the ceilings, we started the process of preparing the kitchen for a fresh coat of paint. A seemingly easy job, it ended up taking most of a day. We started with a walk to Cash Build (a smaller version of Home Depot about an hour walk away) to buy paint, brushes, rollers, masking tape and crack filler. Before we could begin painting, we had to clean off years of dust and dirt from the walls and ceiling supports. Our rags were black after one swipe and with no running water with which to clean them, we ended up mostly spreading the dirt and dust around. However, we did discover that the walls and the plastic tubes protecting the electrical wires were actually white at one point. We then filled the numerous cracks in the walls and began the job of transforming our kitchen from a dark, grimy room into a bright, cozy place in which to cook and eat. With each roll of peach paint onto the walls, we knew that our house was slowly but surely becoming a home in which we could envision many happy times over the next two years.

We were now starting to feel confident in our painting abilities and Kelli even trimmed the windows and doors in green. When the painting was finished we moved all of the furniture back in and began the process of cleaning and sterilizing. Like Esther, gogo was an enthusiastic collector of kitchen treasures and we were left with hundreds of mismatched Tupperware containers, pots, silverware and dishware. Although we grumbled a little about having to sort out the usable from the totally disgusting and washing it all (even the things we put into storage as to not attract rodents), we were thankful that we did not have to use our small stipend to buy these necessary objects.

With the kitchen done, we began moving all of gogo’s house ‘decorations’ into the storage room (a small room off the kitchen filled with extra kitchen equipment). Half of the kitchen equipment stayed in storage as these objects were either broken (two refrigerators, an electric stove, a gas stove and a coal stove, two chairs and a cupboard) or extraneous (hundreds of burnt pots, broken pieces of silverware and mismatched Tupperwear). An obvious packrat, gogo had filled every nook and cranny with the most random objects imaginable. You would open a drawer or cupboard to find it crammed with a collection of miscellaneous objects: old receipts, canned peaches, plastic toys, hand-made doilies, religious flyers, her children’s school papers, Tupperware and yarn. Although the doomsday pictures of angels and demons were amusing we decided to put them into storage as well. We unhappily discovered lots of scat from various inhabitants during our cleaning so during our next trip to town we invested in every kind of trap or poison we could find: roach, ant, fly, mouse, rat and termite. We are happy to report that in conjunction with keeping the house clean, the traps seemed to have done their job in discouraging future colonies of pests from taking up residence.

The next project was the bathroom: cleaning, painting and re-wiring the electric. Joe did his father proud by moving the light switch from the outside of the bathroom to the inside and replacing the light fixture. Of course we joked about being electrocuted, but it didn’t happen while we were working on the electric. (It happened to both of us on separate occasions during our first week in South Africa when we touched an exposed wire next to the light switch in our rondavale. Kelli didn’t learn her lesson and shocked herself again in our current house while cleaning around the circuit breaker with a wet rag. The shocks stung, but we haven’t noticed any lasting damage.) We also decided to remove both the bathroom and the kitchen doors in order to give us more space in both rooms. It wasn’t until we had a guest over for the weekend that we decided we needed something to cover the bathroom door. Joe really wanted a beaded curtain, but after a few weeks of looking and deciding that it might take two years of more to make one, we invested in a nice rainbow curtain.

Towards the end of the week, the local welder stopped by to install burglar bars and doors. Peace Corps mandates that our living quarters be protected with burglar bars (metal bars that go over the windows and doors) and foots the bill for the installation. Our house was only missing bars on a few windows and two doors. Ma convinced us to have a burglar door installed in our bedroom along with the one on the outside door to the kitchen. It was fun testing our language skills with the installers and we now feel much safer with the extra security.

Going in priority of basic needs, we cleaned and painted the bedroom next. We were feeling much better now that we had a clean place in which to store and eat our food and a comfortable room in which to wash ourselves. Making Kelli very happy, we decided on sky blue for the bedroom. The only trick to cleaning and painting this room was that the ceilings were high enough to require a ladder. Luckily, we were able to borrow one from our neighbor and two days later we had a lovely blue room.

Unbelievably, we were able to get all of the above projects finished during our first week at site. Although we still had a long list of things we wanted to accomplish, we were finally able to start unpacking our things and cooking in our kitchen. Over the next few weeks we would walk around the house in amazement at all that we were able to accomplish during that fist memorable week.