March 11 - Fixing up the house

We were again faced with a cold, gray day with occasional snowflakes and flurries, so I knew that this was, despite officially being “meteorological spring”, Still Winter. Nevertheless, after two days of museums we wanted to wander about a bit, so we decided on following the trans-European “X” trail from its nearest point about two blocks away toward the Sachsenwald area. We figured we could walk until we were tired and then branch off to the train stations at Wohltorf, Aumuehle, or Friedrichsruh, depending on how far along we were.

But when I walked over to Aldi’s for the daily grocery run and felt the cold morning drizzle, I began to have second thoughts. My all-time least-favorite weather for walking is a temperature in the 30s, a cold rain, and wind. Minus the wind, this was one of those least-favorite walking days, so I decided to stay inside and work on the house instead—it’s always good to have a Plan B! We discussed eyesores; mine was the partial door jamb on the basement door and Monika’s was the unfinished area surrounding the door from the kitchen to the backyard where someone had completely removed the doorjamb. It turned out that the way we sat for meals she was always staring at the dirty, pockmarked surface and it was just driving her crazy.

I needed to get a feel for how Heinke’s saber saw worked before using to trim the door frame pieces I had found in the trash, however, so the first order of business was to cut the new slats for Uncle Hans-Henning’s old bed to size. It turned out we needed exactly 1 meter long slats, so measuring the length was easy and cutting them turned out to be no problem.

The German saber saw was, to be sure, different in several ways from U.S. models I had used in the past. First, a hex key was used to fasten the blades and to make left-right changes in the cutting angle of the blade, while the U.S. models typically use screws for those purposes. The hex key gave a tighter, more positive adjustment but with the possible disadvantage that you had to have the right size hex key to either change blades or tilt. The German model also had an adjustment for forward-backward tilting of the blade that I had never seen on a U.S. model. That fore and aft angle adjustment used a small grooved roller positioned in back of the blade that also served to support and steady the blade while cutting. I thought that was a great improvement because I have often been bedeviled in the past by saber saw blades bending off to the side and ultimately breaking. The German model also had a dial control for the top speed of the blade so that the variable speed of the trigger control essentially maximized out at different rpms. That I also found to be a more dependable way of controlling blade speed and the resulting cutting action than relying on trigger pressure alone. All in all, I was favorably impressed by the German model compared to similar U.S. models. The only disadvantage I found was that it took a while to spool up to the speed set by the speed control and similarly took a couple of seconds to wind down to a stop after you had released the trigger—the U.S. models start and stop more instantaneously.

I swapped blades to a shorter, finer-toothed one for cutting the door jamb pieces, and the saw also worked very well for that. But now I needed some finishing nails and SOMEONE (round up the usual suspects!) had thrown out the 5 finishing nails I had scavenged from the basement doorframe. I could see why SOMEONE (insert suspect’s name here!) would throw them out; they were, after all, bent and twisted nails that almost no one in their right mind would think of re-using. But that’s just the point; my plan had been to hammer those suckers straight and re-use them to nail on the new pieces. But due to the actions of SOMEONE (convict suspect on circumstantial evidence!), we had to make a quick bike trip to the “Toom” building supply market we had found a couple of days earlier on the border between Reinbek and Glinde.

The route over to Toom’s was flat, but riding the bikes gave us a nice wind chill factor so we had absolutely no problems overheating ! Since Kim had left some spackling compound in the basement and I had earlier bought a spackling knife, we just had to buy finishing nails for the basement door jamb (4.29 Euro), wood putty to fill some minor gouges and holes (3.39 Euro), and white gloss acrylic paint for the kitchen doorframe (6.49 Euro). Looking around the store, I once again found a relative bargain, a 5 Euro claw hammer (German style) that looked better than the one I had bought at Karstadt and was at least 1 Euro cheaper—argh! Knowing where to look to get good tools cheaply was expertise that I was only very gradually acquiring in Germany—it seemed to require a thorough search of builder’s supply markets like Obi and Toom, fancy department stores like Karstadt, and even food stores like Aldi and Famila!

Back at the ranch I nailed up the doorjamb pieces for the basement door and puttied the holes. Then I brought up the spackle from the basement and spackled the holes around the kitchen’s outside door where apparently they had earlier had masonry wall anchors holding a wooden jamb. The spackle was not like the dry wall spackle sold in the U.S.; it was a wet, gray, sandy mix that reminded me very much of masonry mortar. Still, it filled the holes around the kitchen door and that was paramount. Since I had some left over and it seemed to set like cement, I molded the leftover spackle into the shape of some tiles that had broken off where the door jambs met the floor and kind of filled in the worst of those gaps. Waiting for the spackle to dry before painting it, I was surprised to find myself unbearably weary and went upstairs for a nap. I was surprised because I had pretty much stopped taking naps since we came to Germany, possibly because I simply was active pretty much all day every day, or possibly because I was sleeping better at night—not really sure.

In any case, after the nap I painted the kitchen doorframe area and it did look much better. As Monika said, it was fun to do something where you can immediately see a great improvement in appearance. Since it worked so well covering the wrinkles, cracks and dirt on the doorframe, I thought about trying to paint my face sometime—that might improve it also! I thought I’d look nice in banana yellow especially with my hair dyed black, but I’ll have to check with my aesthetic coordinator. We enjoyed the newly painted door during dinner and then watched “Berlin, Berlin” and the evening news before turning in to read for the rest of the evening. I think the reason I liked “Berlin, Berlin” so much was the depiction of normal events and concerns in the lives of the characters. Getting a good job was, for example, a very big and difficult deal for the principal characters, and that corresponded to the importance of the jobs issue in an area of Germany with 20% unemployment. The quality of the scenes in the unemployment office and going out on job interviews seemed accurately portraits of real situations as well as being funny, which is not easy to do.