Our New Home!!!

 

Hi!!

How are you?!

I would offer to take your coat, but we're in a tropical rainforest, so you don't have one…

Come in, come in! Let me give you the tour of our new home!

This is our living room! Our living room set also came with a single chair but there wasn't really any place to put it without it totally closing off the room so… We put it in another room! We tucked the coffee table back in the corner there… When the translators come, we pull out a couple camping chairs and place them around. Our floor is limbum with is the bark of a palm and we covered it in linoleum because there are huge gaps between the limbum… so it keeps the bugs out. The insulation you can see above our rafters, helps with the heat from the tinroof. The chicken wire keeps the rats out. Though they didn't wrap it all the way up to the roof at first, so there was this huge gap between the tin and the edge of the insulation! Huge! An owl got in there one night. Insane racquet. Anyway, we sent for more chicken wire from town, and wouldn't you know, the holes were too big! So they put it up anyway. At least birds can't get in now. Maybe it'll keep the rats out. We didn't have much time before and after to tell really before we went back to Madang…

To your right just out of view is, of course, the front door you just walked in, and that door there is the bathroom. Let's check out that next…

Ok, to your left you see our bucket! That's it! Our toilet! We hope to upgrade to a flush toilet with a septic tank one day, but for right now… Bucket! So Jacob empties that regularly… Toilet roll holder… because this is long term living! Mirror… which is never really used because we don't have a sink or vanity area in here.

 We'll be putting the sink/shelf/counter/vanity area in this corner. Oh! Look, you can see the limbum here. We didn't have enough linoleum for the whole house. Here, the pantry, and the storage closet are left open. So pretty major gaps there…

So to the left is the shower and our half-finished storage closet. They had a wall that went from the purple towel that just reached out about as far as that wooden post beside the tub. It was to separate the shower from the toilet. It's an Australian thing even to go so far as separate rooms for the two! But it made the space very tight… So we tore that down and used the timber for the storage closet there! The padded bucket I sit on when bathing the kids.

So here's our shower/tub. The shower curtain keeps the water off the bamboo walls so they won't rot out, it's taped to the linoleum at the bottom. Later, we'll replace that with laminate Masonite… and then seal the tub to the masonite so we don't get water just sitting under there, which is probably happening right now, but I can't really check without messing up the plumbing. So here there is actually plumbing in the house!! A hole cut through the floor and a PVC path to the back of the house! The gray shower curtain goes all the way to the wall to protect the things on the shelves and there're nails it can hang on to either shut or to hang it open like it is now.

Bucket shower! Fill it with water, use the pulley to haul it up and there's a handle to open or shut the valve. This half mast is great for washing the kids. From sitting on my bucket, with my feet in the tub, I can reach the handle and the soap and wash clothes on our shower caddy and, of course, the kid. This tub! Is remnant from the missionaries who preceded us which is why it's a little rough looking… But it was free! And I didn't have to pay to get it out here, which is great because it's HEAVY.

OK!

Backing out and turning around… Yes! There's our kitchen! And yes, the front door. We tore down that wall in the bathroom and made that little half door to keep the kids out of the kitchen. We don't have cabinets, just shelves, so things are just oh so grab-able! High chairs.. We're going to put a little breakfast nook in the corner but haven't quite gotten there yet. So far we're just eating on the couch.

Pantry door over there… The blue and pink basin is for dish washing. The white bucket above the blue basin is our  water source. It's got a little spigot so we can pretend we have indoor plumbing. Kindle on the coffee cup to keep the flies out. The flies can get irritating… Our French Press. A gift from our friends Adam and Jessica. I asked to use his Starbucks employee discount and when he saw what I wanted, whipped one out of his closet and gave it to us! Thanks! We love it!

Here's our little stove from Liberty Baptist Church. That's a five gallon bucket next to it. The counter is dwarfing the stove but really it's just a tall counter. But comfortably tall. It's nice to work on. The tops are laminated plywood. Our tech services team did that for us in town. I'm going to ask them to laminate our breakfast nook top and a piece to build that bathroom sink/vanity area… Water filter is compliments of The Rising, a church in Norfolk. It's so amazing it can filter out food coloring. Seriously. It keeps us healthy and we do all our cooking and drinking with it, hence it's convenient location by the stove. You see my shelves… 8 feet long. I don't really have enough stuff to fully utilize these… Kitchen stuff at least. But I'm sure the longer we live here, the more stuff we'll find ourselves with…

Ok! The bedroom!

(We have to be in night time now, because the sun from those windows ruins the picture.)

Here's our room! So this is to the right. The wall on the right is the shared wall with the bathroom. The two doorways on the left are the kids rooms. Jacob built the bedframe for us. We needed to factor in the lack of box-springs in the height…  It's maybe a little bit higher than ordinary, but we'll get used to it.

You can see the door to the back porch just in the right corner there. It's supposed to be a porch… but really it's a funny shaped room without screen wire on the window. We might be busting out some walls later…

Behind us we have…

Our desk space! The idea is to get a way of splitting this room in half so that when interns come we can make this another bedroom entirely, but when there's not NEED for another room, I like wide open spaces!

So you see our jackets hanging on the back door. The playroom door is just beyond that. Our desk is half a sheet of plywood. Again.. A bit too tall… But when we have desk chairs rather than camping chairs, it should work out all right. I installed little shelves between the supports for books and our clock… The doorways on the left are to our storage closet it's open back there but we have to entry points. We anticipated shelves in there to the point that it'd be hard to reach things with just one door, but we've no shelves and are thankful just the same.

This is Marissa's room. 4x4, it fits her pack and play well. Eventually, she'll move out of the pack and play and her room will be more like…

James' room! James also has a 4x4 room but it is lined with 5 crib mattresses! Three are tied to the walls and two on the floor. It's actually a super cozy nook and James just loves it. While I knew he loved nooks, I was worried he'd get that trapped in a closet feel… But we didn't actually get interior doors until a month into our stay! So James had a lot of time to get used to his room when it was impossible to get trapped in and then he was totally smitten with his door. It was his new favorite thing. He would frequently call me over to admire it and watch him open and shut it. Adorable.

AND the playroom in the left back corner of the house. Here's where that missing chair is, and really this room gets the best light in the house. The living room has the front porch on it so even though it's on a corner, it's front windows are well shaded from the porch's roof. But here! The light pours in! It's really nice until the sun is directly falling in the room and then it can get HOT. But that's usually during the kids' naps so it works out well.

The kids' camping chairs and toy boxes. We have a clothesline with some animal photos. Those were just ones that happened to be in the language learning photo pile…

The calendar and weather wheel. I'm going to paint the alphabet on the blue but I didn't have a paintbrush… I tried without a paintbrush and didn't like how it turned out, so I painted over it, though you can still see it a bit…

So yeah! That's our house!

We want to thank again, Liberty Baptist Church and The Rising for their contributions to our home. Not featured here is the solar panel that The Rising also hooked us up with. It's mounted on the roof and the system components are all tucked in the storage closet, but it keeps our equipment up and running and helps us do our jobs! Thank you!

Thank you to Adam and Jessica and all the individuals who have contributed a physical gift we can hold.

And thank you to the myriads of people who have made financial gifts to this ministry, both large and small, to help us get established in our home.

As I locked my door for the last time before heading back to Madang, I stifled a sob. I was not ready to leave my new home. And here in Madang, I am ready to get back. And THAT is what we want. For this village house to be HOME. For THIS to be where we want to spend our time. Because THIS is where we do ministry. THIS is where we translate the Bible into Mum. It happens HERE. 

Thank you.

And a very special thank you to… (to be continued)