Our First Days in Slovakia

About 9 a.m. Monday morning, after a quick metro ride to the  market where we could buy a few souvenirs in Hungary, we loaded up into a van Ed had borrowed from another mission organization,

and we drove about 4 hours to the girls' home in Slovakia.

Natasha had a delicious meal waiting for us, but Heather and Kandi Boardman were going to be in charge of cooking for the next few days. 

I loved the embroidered Slovakian curtain hanging at the kitchen window.

Heather and Kandi got right busy planning menus and making a grocery list for shopping later that afternoon.

Jonathan got a good look at the little room in which he was going to be spending most of the next six working days!

With the possibility of up to ten girls plus the house mother and her son housed here in the future, there was most definitely a need for a second bathroom.

On Tuesday morning, the job Ed had for us ladies was to scrape the old plaster and paint off the upstairs hall walls, and to get it ready for painting. Natasha insisted on my wearing something to cover my hair, and Heather loaned me her shower cap!
I felt incredibly lovely!!!!  :)

Natasha also warned us not to try to do too much scraping in one day because she had scraped a whole room one day and couldn't sleep for the pain for the next two nights.
My arm was already still tender from the fall I had taken on the metro, so I just did what I could, hoping for the best!

Later in the day, I went to see how I could help Jonathan. He was having to unwrap the boxes of tile, clean off the globs of glue that kept them from jostling each other, and then lay them.
So I took over the job of unpacking the tile, cleaning them, and handing them to my dear hubby!
It is so fun working together as a team!

I even mixed mortar!
Little did I know this would be the first and last day that I would up to much helping, because of getting sick the next day.

Dan Boardman framed in the window of this bathroom.

I am spraying down the plaster on the other side of the hall now, getting ready to start scraping again.
Of course, we always had to move furniture and other things around before we could do any job.

This room was a big mess, and needed to be cleared out before work could be done. 

Poor Dan was ill before he even arrived, and he could not work more than 45 minutes at a time without stopping to rest. He never complained but we felt so bad for him. He had an awful cough.

His job in this room was to pull up the flooring and bolster it better underneath.

 The above picture is after we had cleared out the room, and if it looks like the air is full of dust, that is because it is! I don't know what we would have done without Carrie. She was a real trooper about keeping messes cleaned up and hauling all manner of things around as we worked in one place after another.

Below, Dan has installed new lighting along the edges of the upper cabinets in the kitchen.

That was such a help, as it was so dark to work at cooking or doing dishes. 

If it looks like there is smoke in the air in the picture below, it's because it is!

Natasha seldom bakes, and she stores hot pads in the oven.
Needless to say, one hot pad began to smoke before the ladies discovered their mistake of not checking the oven when they turned it on!
Below, Kandi and Carrie are toting a big load of painting rags and other stuff out of the hall so that Dan can start painting.

Here is the concrete staircase that we went up and down a hundred times while there.
The little door to the right opens into the bathroom that Jonathan was holed up in most of the time!

Carrie mopping after all the mess of scraping plaster, etc.