The Story of the Hammerschtink House

Ah, the Hammerschtink House. Such a wonder. Such a marvel. Such a smell.

The village of Hammerstein is very nice. Nice-looking, that is. The smell is an entirely different matter. Located across the town a bit (perhaps 300 yards or so from our house) is a big circular pond for processing cow manure. And worse (if that's possible) is the piles of silage, located immediately across the road from the house. Did I mention that there was a heat wave going, when we first arrived in late summer of '03? Ah... take a good whiff...

But, we hoped it would get better, come winter. (It was better, but only when it was frozen outside. Mere rain didn't help very much, for some reason.)

Meanwhile, the house looks quite inviting, when you first arrive. It is really a partitioned half of an old farmhouse. As plainly inscribed above the front door, it was built in 1929. Obviously, the current owners have fixed the place up & partitioned it off, so as to rent it out. And that they do -- to the tune of 1000 'Ros per month! Yikes, that's a lot of money. And it doesn't even include telephone, electricity, garbage, etc. But I digress...

The house is owned by a young-ish couple. With a big dog. The husband, named Matthias, sells solar panels. (He even has a web site, if you want to check it out. I think that's him up on the roof in the picture, installing the panels.) He's really into alternative energy. He has a bio-diesel generator in the basement, that provides heat for the building and for hot water. Which is fine, until he goes away to Morocco for 3 weeks at Christmastime, and leaves his brother in charge, and the generator stops for some reason, and his brother doesn't know how to fix it, and then I come home from a trip, really really late on New Year's Eve, and it's really really cold out, and there's no heat, and it stays really really cold out, and Matthias isn't due back for another week or so, and we have no heat, and we pretty much freeze. Not that that would ever happen, of course...

But I digress... The thing that sticks in my mind about Matthias is that one of the long-term teachers at school, upon learning where I was living, reflected and said, "Oh, yeah... I know the guy who's your landlord. I saw him once with a huge fan strapped to his back, getting ready to go parasailing..." Anyways, we seldom had occasion to talk with him much. Except to try to convince him that the heater control was not following the schedule that it was supposedly set to follow. I'm pretty sure the problem was that his master controller, located some unknown place, had the wrong clock setting -- thus rendering our subordinate controller unpredictable. But I digress...

The Hammerschtink House. Ah, yes. Michael and I were placed there because it was available, within the pool of "BFA rentals", because the family that usually live there were back in Canada on furlough, that year. (Well... there's more to the story of how Michael & I got to live there, but that comes later in the story.)

The house seems very nice, upon first appearances. But first appearances are deceiving. Turns out, the house is a living hell.

[Warning: lots of complaints follow. I'm not bitter or anything; I just like to complain. And, boy, was there a lot to complain about.]

The whole town, sadly, reeks up a storm. The house itself is beset with problems: the radiators are incapable of heating the place up -- even when they do turn on and we had it cranked up full. There is a traditional green-tiled woodburning stove (which one feeds from the kitchen, and which then warms up all the tiles, most of which are not in the kitchen but in the living room). However, the stove is such that it requires someone there to constantly tend it. Fine, if you have a stay-at-home wife like the family that usually live there. But with Michael & I, there was nobody at home most of the time. I usually was there for a few hours of sleep per night, a morning shower, and then gone the rest of the day. Michael was there a bit more than that -- but not tons. So, the wood-burning stove was not useful to us. It was difficult to get going, in the first place; and I'm not very good at starting fires -- and let me tell you, Michael is worse [he's a city boy, ya know; when he tried to start it up, it produced nothing but smoke; a lot of smoke]. I started it a couple times [with a pretty fair amount of smoke, too], but it takes hours and hours to get the living room warm -- and never does do much more than that.

Then there are the bugs. The place was thick with Indian Meal Moths. Now, I've seen infestations before. But this was bad. I soon went through all the stored foodstuffs, and found 11 of them infested with moths, plus 2 infested with some kind of weevil. That, I hoped, would suffice -- once the next two generations of mothy hatchlings died off. Alas, no; they persisted. I wondered where they were living, what they were eating. I searched again and found nothing. I then searched the web, and discovered that Indian Meal Moths will also dain to eat dried flowers. Well... the family that lives in the place long-term had -- and it's all very sweet and touching and all -- had kept a whole stockpile of flower bouquets, stacked atop a dish cupboard. That was the place for 'em. Finally, we got that cleared out [they wanted to keep the stinkin' flowers (:-O), so Michael & I just stuffed them in bags and put them down in the basement].

Then there were the biting bugs. We were warned upon arrival that there were some unknown, unseen little bugs that live in the tree in the back yard. Don't go back there much (except to toss stuff in the compost bin), because they will bite you. Well... I never could determine the source of the bug bites -- outdoor invisible bugs that live only in that one tree, or indoor bed bugs that bite and then run & hide, or maybe just flees from the dog next door -- but whatever the source, yes, one does get bit. It wasn't usually too bad for me. But Michael often had many bites around the ankles.

Then there was the generally dirty feeling of the whole place. Yuck. You just couldn't get the place to look or feel clean. [Not like I had much time to even try; I was always at school. But still, it's not a nice feeling.] I eventually retreated to one of the upstairs rooms, because (a) I seemed to get away from the biting bugs; mostly, anyhow; (b) the upstairs rooms didn't feel so dingey; and (c) heat rises; it was a bit warmer up there. I also discovered an electric heater in one of the rooms! I was happy for that!!

And it wasn't just a dirty feeling. Michael had big allergies kick in, while we lived there. He eventually determined that they were worst in the living room. So he mostly avoided going in there at all, after that. He also got his family to send him a bunch of allergy medicine. Thankfully, I'm not allergic. (Oh, and when we moved out, Michael reported that his allergies immediately went away.)

Then there's the dishwasher. Now, any of you who know me know that I like a good dishwashing machine. And when we moved in, I was happy to see that the house had one. Alas, it broke. I no longer recall when -- but I think it was November sometime. Now, neither Michael nor I had time to mess with it, so we were reduced to doing dishes by hand. Well... I was hardly ever there, anyhow. Eventually, however, we saw a family that was leaving wanted to sell their old dishwasher. So, we bought it. It sat around a while, until I had a chance to hook it up. That was mid-January. The next week, we got a call about moving out of the place! (Go figure!)

Then there's the contaminated water. In mid-/late-October, we got a bright orange flier on the doorstep. In four languages (German, French, Turkish, and happily, English), it warned residents to boil all water before consumption. There had been some contamination detected. Just in Hammerstein, you understand. Surrounding villages and Kandern were OK; it was just us. I asked on of the long-termers, and he said, "Oh, yeah, that happens every once in awhile. Usually it's over within a week or two. Well, Hammerstein usually takes a week or so longer to clear out, what with all the cows and things..." That was October 20-something. We never did receive word that it was OK to drink the water again. (Though I heard something 2nd hand about a notice having appeared in the newspaper; but we never got another bright orange flier on the doorstep telling us it was OK now.) So, from October until we moved out in late January, we used bottled water. [And most of the bottled water here is carbonated. Ever brushed your teeth with carbonated water? Fun.]

Then there's the v e r y s l o w clotheswasher. This takes a bit of explaining. Germans are... well... Germans are weird about water. The theory is that it's very precious, and costs a lot, and so we don't want to waste it. In practice, I can't see that anybody actually does anything to lessen their water usage; but that's a different story. I dunno; maybe they use river water for stuff & I just don't realize it. Anyhow, all the clothes washers are stinking' front-loading things, that barely draw any water into them at all. The thinking is that, well, we can just run the machine for a long time, swishing back and forth that tiny amount of water, and then the clothes will be clean!

Well, I got news for ya. It don't work. There are just a couple little problems. (1): the machines beat your clothes to death; expect frayed edges on everything, quite prematurely. (2): it doesn't actually get your clothes very clean; expect dingey hues to all your clothes. [Hey, maybe if it used a little bit of WATER, it might WORK!] (3) it takes a really long time to do laundry. Our clotheswasher took -- and I swear to you that I am not making this up -- it took 2 hours and 8 minutes to do a single load of clothes. Now, you understand, that's just the washer; we're not to the dryer, yet. 2:08 just to get the washer done.

The clothesdryer -- well, we were just glad that it existed. The long-term family never used it, and was afraid it would start a fire. It was ancient. But it worked, and Michael & I both used it, happily.

Now.. let's see... what complaints have I left out... ah, yes...

The price. This princely dwelling cost a whopping 1000 euros per month to rent! Given the falling US dollar, that works out to between $1100 (when we started in September '03) to $1270 (when we finished in January '04). That's a lot of money. Come to find out that other places in the area were renting for somewhere from 500 to 800 euros per month (often with utilities included). WHAT WERE THEY THINKING WHEN THEY SIGNED THE LEASE ON THIS PLACE??? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING WHEN THEY RENEWED THE LEASE ON THIS PLACE?????

I just don't know. Simple insanity. Fortunately(?), Michael and I got a reduced rate. It only cost us 800 'Ro per month, because -- oh, you knew there had to be a punch-line -- because the family that had been slated to go into it, took a look at it, lived there for a couple days, and then TURNED IT DOWN! Indeed, their mission agency had to foot the 200 'Ro per month, to make up the difference for what Michael & I would have paid in some other place. Now, as much as I regret the pain Michael and I went through in that place, the fact is that those people were smart! [It turns out they were rather picky, too, as they proceeded to reject 2 other apartments before finally settling into a place that had to be vacated for their benefit. But that's another issue.] Of course, we didn't hear that part of the story until much later.

This also explains a little discrepancy in communications. Prior to arriving, I asked, "Is my apartment going to be close enough to school that I won't necessarily need to buy a car?" Answer: yes, it is easy walking distance. Arrival: oops, you're 2 miles away from school. The nearest grocery store is a little beyond that. I should've immediately bought a car... but I never re-analyzed that question, until it was too late, and we were into the school year, and I had no time whatsoever to do car shopping. So, I would catch a ride into school every morning with Michael, and walk home every morning [like... 2, 3, maybe 4 or 5:00 am] to sleep a little and shower. Crazy.

So... let's recap here:

Finally, in mid-January, a co-worker sold me her car. At least I no longer had to walk. Also, we had rearranged my workload at school, so I wasn't so totally overloaded. Things were definitely looking up.

Then, on January 28, the unthinkable happened. It was a snow-day -- classes cancelled. So Michael & I were home. The phone rang. I answered. The Personnel office asked, "We have a family coming in, and your place is the only one that's big enough to house them. Would you be willing to move out?"

I explained the question to Michael. Of course, we had to take some time to think it over -- I'd say, about 3 nanoseconds -- and then we consented to the idea.

And there was much rejoicing.