On a very hot early September day, after I chose some potentially useful things for my new home, I boarded a truck from the countryside where my grandparents live. The house there is a small graveyard of all my family’s flats and houses, so finding useful stuff was not hard. My driver was our first neighbor, who also loaded around 3½ m³ of wood for the old stove my grandparents have gifted to me. My freshly cut short curly hair, the cigarette constantly in the guy’s mouth, a puppy in my lap, and a truck in a half-driving condition were adding genuine gypsy touch to this picture. As the windows of the truck could not open, and obviously there was no air-conditioning, it made it one of the most dreadful drives in my life. Even at moments when I would forget about the sauna effect, I was constantly in fear Sola would impolitely and carefree piss on the seat. But she was a lady, so she did not.

The previous night my driver was at the wedding, so he was tired enough that we did not have to talk too much. Far from me being asocial, but my night was not any less exhausting. That day I had freshly picked up my dog from the obedience school, and due to the lack of space, slept with her and my mum in the same room. After we finally made Sola to sleep, my mum started her regular visits to the toilet every hour, waking both of us up. Sola would each time curiously follow her around, making in the progress a lot of mess, so in the end I concluded poor dog is actually less trouble than my own mother.

When we finally made it to here, in order to leave the guy enough time to go back, we unloaded everything as somebody gave us some speed. While Sola was loudly drinking out of the biggest bucket I could find around, I sat on the stairs, thinking ‘I am finally here’. By the end of that day, I had only managed to get all the things inside and fell asleep like a dead man. In the following days, she was very quickly learning to do her thing outside, and pretty much the only thing we did was enjoying our new freedom, repeating diligently her obedience routine.

As from spring I have been regularly coming here to visit, I had a quite clear picture what needs to be done in order to make this space functional and livable for winter to come. The key problem was that the original layout of the house was not practical. The kitchen was downstairs, and all the bedrooms and the toilet upstairs. Obviously, heating two spaces was not an option, and surely I did not need (nor want) to use all this available space. The idea was thus to build upstairs a chimney for the wood-burning stove, and to fit a small convenient kitchen. This in total would make around 35 m² of well organized space, which would be easier to heat, and practical to use.

Luckily, there was some undefined space in front of the bathroom, which already had tiles and a small sink inside, so it made it easier to transform it into a kitchen. Although the overall space to refurnish was relatively small, it asked for a lot of different tasks. That was a quite serious challenge, as being in the middle of nowhere, anybody willing to come to work would charge you a lot just for coming here. I was determined to do on my own as much as I knew, or could learn, but obviously I needed somebody with more experience.

As the main water supply pipe in the bathroom/kitchen area got broken earlier that summer during the installation of a water pump, that was the first thing to fix. After I found a plumber, he luckily helped me to find an electrician. It was some outdoing elderly Serbian with a strange Italian/Spanish surname, who willingly agreed to come to install a few sockets, as there were not any in the area intended for the new kitchen. After these two guys finished their work, leaving a huge mess behind, I was left with no idea where to find somebody for a million of small jobs that were still left to be done. I needed to put back up the tiles, build the kitchen cabinets, install a sink, make a hole in the roof for a new chimney, install a wood-burning stove, paint the walls, move a lot of furniture, ah yes, and fix the roof! After the first serious rain, I became aware that my roof is actually in a far worse condition than I originally anticipated. It was seriously leaking in a few areas, and to make it more confusing, in a hide-and-seek style, the leaks would change their position with every new rain.

After asking around among the locals, I was at last recommended a guy from the neighboring village. Looking now back, I am not sure I would be able to make sense out of all of this without him. The moment he came, he had this attitude which was suggesting that everything what I had originally envisaged is possible to do. Just prior to that, my neighbor with decent building experience came to the house, and after he had been looking around for about 30 minutes, commenting in the progress every little scratch, he pessimistically concluded that the house is in such a bad condition that my best strategy is to stay for the next few nice days, and then pack my bags and run as fast as I can. That was the only point so far when I thought that I am really crazy for doing all of this, but after I politely walked him out, I became even more determined to make it happen. In only 5 days, with my new, no-drama, super-fast, super-precise handyman, the main part was already done. He came a few more times to finish off some things, and after two months of living in this concrete tent, I was  finally able to move in, happy as a little pig in mud. In the end the whole space turned out to be one big re-usage project, as nothing we used was really new. I was finding still usable, sometimes even very cool retro stuff in my two basements, where human foot did not step for a long time, as well as in some old abounded houses around.

During this time of refurbishment, my days were fully occupied. I was however regularly finding time to cook. Since the very beginning I have started making my own bread, experimenting with seeds, olives, and almonds. The bread now holds a legendary status in our neighborhood, being a sort of my trademark. As until spring I would not have any of my own grown vegetables, I was at least trying to get as much of it possible from the local sources. On the top of that, I have learned some basics about fishing, and now can quite successfully provide some fish and squids for my own needs. By advising some books and asking around, I have also learned to pick up and dry a few types of herbs for tea, which I so adore.

As nobody could really explain to himself what a young woman alone is doing here, my arrival was not any less than a sort of a light tectonic disorder. For some time, to people who did not know me from before, I was ‘that girl with the black dog’, which seemed to be only adding to the mystery. That was the reason why at first I had to socialize quite a bit. Here you have the culture of people just coming to your house, so I needed to adapt to the fact that you always have to be ready to welcome curious strangers. But, as the winter was quickly approaching, the number of visitors proportionally decreased. Pretty much to me and ‘the black dog’.