With a new garden that is essentially a blank canvas, I’ve been trying my hand at garden design. This is my first project.
Category Archive: Our Church
Aug
17
Jugendraum Conversion, part 2: Building the Walls
The next steps in building our new shower room upstairs involved putting in place the structure of the bathroom. We installed a new vapor barrier, had a window put in, and built the partition walls. We even did some of these things two or three times because it was so much fun the first time …
Aug
04
Jugendraum conversion, part 1: Destruction
Over the last couple of months, we’ve been busy with building the new bathroom upstairs in the former Jugendraum, and renovating the rest of the room itself. Our initial plans can be found in this older post. We’ve had lots of new experiences, partially since we, the neophytes, decided to do some of the work …
Jun
25
Solar Thermal Collectors
The merits as I see them of solar thermal water and heating support, and a little of our experiences getting such a system installed.
Jun
08
The State and Floorplans at Purchase: The Garden/Parking Lot
Lame mathematician jokes and the things that can be done using only a hose, a pair of secateurs, and a soup spoon. And a pictorial tour of the sorry state of the garden around our church at time of purchase.
May
13
How to Get Permission to Convert a Former Sacred Building to a Home in Germany
We finally got planning permission. Since we couldn’t find a how-to for getting change-of-usage permission applications in Germany anywhere on the web, I thought I’d write one. I’ve decorated this post with images of buildings needing conversion which are currently for sale.
May
03
The Provisional Kitchen
Relatives have been expressing curiosity about our kitchen arrangement. So, as promised, here are a few photos of where we cook now. We still don’t have warm water outside the cellar, and the spot where we will ultimately install a proper kitchen is still buried under a pile of boxes, and this isn’t likely to change for another few months. In such cases, one must improvise.
Apr
24
The Benefits of Trimming an Overgrown Hazelnut Tree
The house came with an overgrown hazelnut tree. I found the hard work of trimming the tree gave several benefits, some unexpected. I include a recipe for cured hazelnut-smoked goose breast.
Apr
12
Bad-planning: Arranging the upstairs wet room
We’ve been particularly busy with planning the upstairs wet room, involving several design dilemmas. I’m including here some sketches of our solutions to those problems. The bathroom is a very small space indeed. We’ve taken some inspiration from the lilliputian bathrooms we’ve encountered at various hotels in Brussels over the years. The Belgian bath designers can fit a whole bathroom into the tiniest spaces. Ours will be about 3 m2, which is far from the smallest of the Brussels bathrooms. A Belgian would probably think we have plenty of room for a tub too.
Apr
06
Adventures in Brown-Thumb Gardening: Strawberry-Herb Hanging Baskets
I have a brown thumb. This has been well demonstrated to me by numerous crunchy brown houseplants. Any plant under my control generally looks vibrant and happy for a few months, and then suddenly dies. Then I give up on plants. I tend to forget about my ineptness if I haven’t had to care for …
Mar
24
The Plan of Renovations: Ground Floor Part I
This is (finally!) the long promised third post in the series covering our plans for renovating and converting our church. Our plans have been changing quite quickly here, and there are some aspects that are still open. Nonetheless, a hazy picture of what is to come is slowly emerging. For comparison, my post about the …
Mar
07
The Plan of Renovations: Upper Floor
This is the second post covering our plans for remodeling our church. The changes we plan for this floor are probably the most urgent.
Mar
04
The Plan of Renovations: The Attic
I’m typing this while having just had more than my fair share of a bottle of my beloved St. Laurent – one of our last from Vienna. A snip of song has been coming in and out of my consciousness stream. I google the lyrics. Maybe I mistyped something, since google auto-completed my query with …
Feb
28
The State and Floorplans at Purchase: The Basement
This is the third post in the series on the condition and layout of the property at time of purchase. This basement, like one would expect, is a bit less fun to look at than, say, the main worship hall. I’m going to focus a bit on the practical aspects of heating and other necessities. …
Feb
25
The State and Floorplans at Purchase: Upper Floor and Attic
This is the second entry in the series of posts on the state-at-purchase of the building. The first post installment included a tour of the ground floor. As throughout this series, the photos here were not originally intended to be “good photography”, but rather reference photos, so please lower expectations accordingly. Like last time, I’ll …
Feb
21
The State and Floorplans at Purchase: Ground Floor
This is the first post in a four part series in which I’ll post some pictures from our various viewings of the property. These photographs were originally intended to be only for our own reference, so they are not exactly of the highest quality, or well composed or any such thing. Nevertheless, they should give …
Feb
18
The Search
After 15 years and 6 countries of wanderings, my husband and I decided (well, ok, I insisted) it was time to settle down. After being mired in abstractions for so long, I’ve got the overwhelming desire to do something creative that is tangible, visible, and concrete for a change. Since we are not tied to …
About the author, this blog, and our church.
Together with my spouse, I bought a redundant church in a somewhat randomly chosen spot in Germany in early 2011 and we are working on making it habitable - and fabulous.
This blog is an account of our conversion adventures. I've also developed quite an enthusiasm for church conversions, and church architecture in general.
The building was built by the New Apostolic Church in the 1970s. It has lots of fundamental architectural features in common with gothic chapels (soaring ceiling, single nave, huge pointed windows, layout, etc.), but expressed using a modernist/post-modernist architectural vocabulary.
I love comments, so please do say hello!