Lucky, lucky, lucky

Just as I was starting to make some progress on personal projects, we had to move house. Our landlord got divorced and needed to move into our flat herself. (That’s about the only reason that you can be forced to move out of rented property before the end of a contract here.) We were pretty annoyed about it to start with, because we liked the place a lot and the rental property market in Villach is not great right now.

However, we lucked out. Oh, how we lucked out. After seeing a few not so nice places, we realised we were going to need to spend a little more than we’d been planning, so we expanded what we were looking at. And we found a little house for rent in Drobollach, a couple of minutes walk from Faaker See.

It’s really really great. It has a big garden with fruit trees and bushes and a big willow for shade. It has a Kachelofen for heating, which is a wood-burning enclosed fire with a big brick heat storage system attached to it and ducting to carry heat upstairs. I was initially sceptical of heating a whole house with wood, but it works really well. And it means we have to chop firewood, which is a new thing for me.

There are mountains all around (visible from more or less everywhere in the house), and the surrounding area is great for running–some flat, some not so flat. Winnie is happy, because there’s are fields right by the house with rabbits and mice. It’s very quiet: obviously especially so now, and it’s a tourist spot in the summer normally, but it should still be very peaceful. The neighbours are nice, and one of Rita’s patients lives right over the road.

There’s also a big shed in the garden that I’m planning to use as an office and workshop. It doesn’t have power to it yet, but once it’s hooked up it will be pretty cool. I dug a trench and laid a power cable from the house, but we need an electrician to come to do the wiring.

The shed is big enough to have both a desk for computer work and a bench for electronics, which will be a huge improvement on the setup in our last place. There I had a desk for work, but doing any electronics meant unpacking soldering station, boxes of components, lights, magnifier, tools and laying them out on the dining table, then packing everything up when I was done. (And then cleaning everything off very carefully, since the table was where we ate.)

We’re now pretty much settled in, and if things were normal, we’d be getting back to normal about now. Things aren’t at all normal though, so it feels like a huge piece of luck to have ended up in such a good place right when we can’t go anywhere else.