Finishing touches and next steps

New mirror cupboard and light © Ricky Yates

My apologies once again, for another long pause between blog posts. I was planning to write something back on Tuesday 6th March, only for my laptop to crash whilst downloading a Windows 10 update 🙁 Two days later, I travelled to Berlin for a meeting of the Council of Anglican & Episcopal Churches in Germany (CAECG). Twenty-four hours into the meeting, I went down with a very nasty bout of vomiting and diarrhoea from which it took me a week to recover.

But enough of my ills – this is a short update of further progress with the house.

Having had the previous shower room completely gutted, I had to choose new fitments and then have one . . . → Read More: Finishing touches and next steps

Living in the middle of a building site

The kitchen in advance of moving in © Ricky Yates

My sincere apologies for the for the absence of any new posts here since very early January. The main reason is in the title of this one. On Monday 8th January, I began a period of just over three weeks, living in the middle of a building site.

When I purchased my new home in Stará Oleška, I knew I would need to have the kitchen completely refurbished. As you can see in this photograph, taken after the previous owners had moved out but before we moved in, the only fittings were a sink, one floor unit, three small wall units, together with a wood-burning stove.

When I first viewed the house back . . . → Read More: Living in the middle of a building site

Logs

Logs © Ricky Yates

The main source of heating for my home in Stará Oleška is a wood-burning stove, located in the kitchen. The previous owners left a fair supply of split logs, stacked in one end of the woodshed, located on one side of the back garden. They also left a further supply of logs, mostly not split, sitting in a pile in the middle of the back garden, partially covered by various pieces of unsightly plastic that were doing very little to keep them dry.

Over a couple of days, very soon after moving here in mid-May 2017, Sybille and I, aided by two wheelbarrows, successfully moved all of that pile of logs, from the back garden, stacking them neatly with the other logs in the woodshed. The unsightly plastic was then . . . → Read More: Logs

Winter has arrived

Stará Oleška 44 in the snow © Ricky Yates

This past weekend, winter has well and truly arrived in Stará Oleška. Whilst since the beginning of the month, snow fell on three or four occasions, it never amounted to much and rapidly melted. But the morning of Friday 15th December brought a more serious snowfall, and it has snowed again on several occasions since then and it is doing so once more, even as I write this blog post.

Stará Oleška 44 in the snow © Ricky Yates

However, on the morning of Monday 18th, the snow stopped for several hours and the sun came out, enabling me to take the photographs accompanying this post. And to take the photograph on the left, I did go . . . → Read More: Winter has arrived

I have been granted permanent residency in the Czech Republic

Certificate of Permanent Residence © Ricky Yates

As I wrote in my earlier blog post entitled, ‘Czech bureaucracy – yet again‘, on Monday 30th October 2017, I submitted my application for permanent residency in the Czech Republic at the offices of the Czech Ministry of the Interior (MOI) in Ústí nad Labem. I was informed then, that the authorities now had up to sixty days to consider my application before coming to a decision. Once a decision was made, I would receive a phone call, summoning me back to the MOI office.

Last Friday morning, exactly forty days after submitting my application, my phone rang. It was from a number unknown to my phone and the caller spoke in Czech. Fortunately, the one word I did understand in the caller’s . . . → Read More: I have been granted permanent residency in the Czech Republic