In April 2000 I bought a new apartment. It is in a new house on the outskirts of Prague. I got the apartment bare, only with tiles in the bathroom and washroom and the appropriate fixings there. Here I am surveying the place when they completed it in September.

I started by fixing my storage room - I laid a floor there, my parents helped me to make some shelves and I was all set: I had a place to put my stuff and I could sleep on the floor in my sleeping bag. The toolbox in the right corner was done later (in March). In October I had the floors made in the rest of the apartment, meanwhile I was fighting to have repairs made (you wouldn't expect a new house to be all perfect, would you?) and some I did myself, like my first rewiring job. A week later I've been still caughing up brick dust.

In November and December they delivered some furniture and appliances for the kitchen and the living room. I got both pieces of furniture custom-made, it was (surprisingly) cheaper and the only option available. I really enjoyed designing it, as you can see, I went more for a utility value than some fashion statement (which is perhaps a statement in itself), in the living room the priority was to have as many bookcases as possible, by putting books in two rows I later managed to fit them all - barely. (Remark added in 2003: I just run out of space for books, gotta get some new shelves). I also bought some stuff for the washroom and the apartment was livable. I moved in before Christmas.

In February 2001 I started my first "furniture project": big closets for the hall and the bedroom and a small tool chest you saw in the storage room. I designed the pieces (perhaps the most enjoyable part for me), draw a plan of wooden pieces I needed and had them cut in a factory, them masked the edges and put them together, it was done by the end of the month. After going to many furniture stores and comparing, I am quite happy with the quality of my home-made furniture - and comparable pieces in stores cost at least twice as much (and do not fit my place so well anyway). Here I am working on the hall closet; here's how it looked then, before I made the doors. Here's the bedroom wardrobe, I had to buy sliding doors later.

Before I did the doors for the hall closet, I wanted to start on the second big project, six smallish closets, since making hinges involved some nasty drilling with a special bit that I wanted to borrow for a weekend. The optimal solution would be to have as many doors ready as possible to drill them all in one weekend. The smaller closets were much easier to do and every evening and weekend I just watched them grow under my hands. Here I am working on a little bedside thingy. When the Easter came, the closets were ready for the doors and drawers. I managed to do the doors by the end of March, so many of the closets were now done. In particular, here's how the hall looks now and here is the bedroom wardrobe.

During this time, late at night when I had to be quiet, I spent my time sorting out my library. I enjoyed unpacking the boxes a lot, some of them I sent home from Canada in 1996. By the end of April the drawers were done, too, and I could take a break, everything that I started was done. Among other things, in the washroom I added a little cabinet next to the one I bought. Funny story: While hanging the cabinet I actually drilled into electrical wiring - it was in place where there was supposed to be no wiring. It took me 3 hours to fix it, another 2 hours to change the way the cabinet is hanged, and I was mad for a week. My bro - who was visiting at the time and helping out - was laughing at me a lot the whole day. He says there was a 6-in flame shooting from the hole in the wall (I just saw a flash and fell of a chair so I don't know, but the drill point was roasted), of course all the fuses were blown. In bedroom I put a little bedside stand, I finished the toolbox in storage room, made a drawer chest for my writing desk, a little thingy for the dining corner and another storage place for the kitchen (next to the fridge).

This ended the first furniture maddness. I have to admit that I enjoyed the craft a lot, I just loved watching the furniture grow under my hands. Then I decided to take a break and do something else, for instance fix my garden, which by May started to resemble a jungle; I bought a sickle (I already had a hammer) and did something about it. I rounded up the summer by putting laundry lines in the washroom.

Over the winter I did some small repairs that I could manage and spent a lot of time arguing about warranty repairs for problems I could not fix. I've been saving energy for the summer 2002, since I wanted to have a closer look at my garden. When I tried to turn the earth a bit the previous summer, I could not put the spade in more than half an inch. Upon closer inspection I found that the "earth" they put into the "garden" contained so many stones that it was virtually impenetrable. And so when the semester ended I bought myself a pick and started to dig. I thought I would take the stones out, but I soon found out that I will have to settle just for taking out the bigger stones, otherwise my grandchildren would still see me at it. Even so I estimate that the stones I took out constituted more than half of the volume of the dirt I dag out, so I had to buy a new one (and better) for filling in the garden. Besides stones I found also other treasures like pipes, pieces of tire, coal, bricks and more. I started to wonder whether I really paid for a garden, it seemed more like a junkyard. It was slavery, it was slow, it became personal. To get some break I made two beds. When I was roughly halfway through, the famous rains and floods of 2002 came and that was it for the year.

Over the winter I found Marketa and she moved in, so in the spring I started another stage of furniture building. I made another bedside stand to have a pair of them and also another big bedroom wardrobe, women have lots of clothes. As far as I was concerned, the bedroom was done. In summer 2003 I finally finished digging and cleaning the garden. I extended my collection of curious finds by several interesting objects including about 3 yards of steel cable. During the winter I was again fixing some little problems like cracking walls and stuff and in the spring of 2004 the influence of my wife won another victory, we bought a carpet for our living room. She chose it and I have to admit that it looks really good.

The summer 2004 started with the first large repair. The previous summer, when I removed dirt from the terrace I discovered that one end was falling apart. The builders tried to convince me that it is perfectly normal for a concrete to fall apart after a few years, but after a year of exchanging letters they finally agreed to fix it. Then I had to do another round of garden digging, since it turned out that I left too many stones and did not dig deep enough. This time it went better and I finished in about two months, again I found many interesting objects including a coin more than 100 years old. As a relaxation I did some small things for home, like this little shelf for flowerpot.

Traditionally, no big things were happening during the winter, apart from the fact that we were expecting and we wanted to prepare the apartment for the coming baby. I had to vacate the "baby room", which meant getting rid of my computers. With a tear in my eye I played one more game and then stored my gaming comp in the garage, I hope we will meet again. The work computer found an asylum in the living room, I made a little craddle for it. Then we fought for the second big repair, because the ceiling is going down and walls were cracking quite a bit. By May we won and they immediately started (which was nice of them, we were getting worried as the term was in June), they broke the walls in all major rooms, there was mess everywhere and we even had to sleep in a tent in our garden. Finally it was over and we could put the apartment together. I painted walls everywhere (another of my firsts, it came out reasonably well), then we put a new carpet in the bedroom, where we also prepared a little baby corner. For the kids room we after long search found a nice soft carpet that looks like a meadow (with little flowers) and we've designed and had custom-made some furniture there. Again, I used this opportunity to do some little things. I made these little shelves to vacate another big shelf for books in the living room (by the way, I do have a soft spot for vampires and bats), and in the entrance hall I made a little set of racks. This was the first time in years that I worked with wood again (the furniture was all done from pressed wood, which is way easier to work with), I was a bit apprehensive but it went well. We had lots of fun thinking of what pictures to put on the baby rack, it was another story to cut them from wood and paint them. My training from making scale airplanes came in handy and it was worth it, it's a big hit with every kid that sees it.