I mentioned on Friday that we had called an electrician to come out and hook up the stove and oven as well as take care of a few other things around the farm. He was supposed to arrive at 3pm but actually didn’t make it here until almost 5:30pm. Not a huge deal since Stefan kinda wanted to be here anyway to talk to the guy and I didn’t have any thing else I needed to be doing outside of the farm. The hook up of the stove and second oven was no big issue at all….and we are happy to report that we used it every day this weekend. Pretty nice to have a full range to cook on instead of two little camping burners…although we do miss the gas experience a bit.
The electrician also took a look at our satellite dish and said that we would need to install a new one along with running new cables and so on. Apparently they are switching away from analog programming here in Germany so the satellite on the house now would become obsolete in a few months. The guy will need to order the digital box and a few other things but we told him that there is no rush on hooking it up. We’ve been without TV since mid-January and neither of us really misses it that much. Sometimes it’s nice to just have that endless chatter in the background but we have the radio for that.
And just as Stefan was arriving home, the electrician was taking a look at our front gate opener. Low and behold, he walks over and pushes the button to open the door and the motor starts running….just like it should. The doors don’t open at the moment because we’ve lost all the hydraulic fluid now while opening them manually, but it would seem that the doors are close to being back to normal. We don’t have a clue what happened there but I guess the guy has an electric touch or something. We’re just happy that we don’t need to replace anything there for now.
At some point we will also have him run electricity into the garden so that we can have a light in the greenhouse and probably a plug as well for heaters, etc. It should be no problem according to the electrician which is what we always like to hear.
All in all, it was a very pleasant experience and we also got to hear a bit about this guy’s experience buying a house in our neighborhood. Despite all the troubles we had getting this house, this guy and his wife had it even worse. They spent over 16,000 Euros to clean out their house when they bought it…and because they bought it from two complicated brothers (one was crazy, the other an alcoholic) things weren’t easy. They also had to deal with the banks who gave the family loans for the property since it went into foreclosure. Then the electrician had to wait TWO YEARS to finally get clearance on the house from the banks. Each bank needed 6 months to clear the loans…and they couldn’t work simultaneously. I think we would have just told them to forget it…so at least we can be thankful that we didn’t have it that bad 🙂
