Living Life by our "lessons learned"

As we have been living here in an urban city I can’t help but notice some of the things that Singapore does right that our city just doesn’t get.  When we knew we were moving back to the states we were excited, yet we had learned a thing or two.  We had led our lives in a “different” way.  We lived small and simply, without a car and we lived fully!  We experienced life, culture and other ways of living.  Coming back to our home country, we had in our minds that we wanted to continue some of the things that we had “learned”.  Many of our friends were surprised that we didn’t want to move back into our beautiful home.  And let me tell you the house, the yard, and the neighborhood ARE beautiful.  Yet, we wanted something different now.  Our priorities changed, our perspective broadened.  If we were to move back to Charlotte it needed to be different, it needed to encompass some of the new things we had learned on our Singapore adventures.  No longer were certain things important to us.

Some days I look at our new lives here and I think, “ What have we gotten ourselves into?”.  Really, what sane person would move back to their home country and take on the huge task of renovating an old home when you also had to deal with buying 2 new cars, reacquainting yourself with your home city, putting your daughter in a new school and oh yeah, did I mention finding a new source of income?  See what I mean?  Really, sometimes I do think we are crazy.  Yet, as we constantly reevaluate our circumstances we continually make the same choice.  Our little blue house gives us so much more of the “things we have learned” than any other choices did. 

Some of our more seasoned city friends think we should stay here in our little 700+ sq. ft. condo in the city.  To be honest there are great advantages of living in the city.  Like walking out your door to: a plethora of restaurants, the science center, the kid’s library, a park, and lots of incredible people watching.  These things are great, yet living in the city as a family does have its challenges.  First, we are living in an old building in an apartment that is 700+ sq. feet.  We essentially have 2 main rooms: a bedroom and a room for everything else.  Sorry to say, as adaptable as we are, this just doesn’t work for us!  We also don’t have dedicated parking.  As a single person that might be just fine, but when you have to walk a child, groceries etc. 2 plus blocks it gets daunting, not to mention the 4 to 6 flights of stairs that we have to walk up once we get here.  We also worry about our 2 beautiful new cars getting broken into.  Grocery shopping isn’t easy either.  At least we have a grocery store in the bottom of our building, but one shopping trip typically includes more than one grocery bag.  Since our building is old we don’t have an efficient elevator that can wiz you upstairs.  Gone are our Singapore days where the lift took you right to your living quarters.  That was a pure slice of heaven.  And grocery delivery, no such thing here!  Singapore got that part right too.  If you spent over $100 pretty much any store grocery or otherwise would deliver your goods for free.  What an ingenious idea!  If we could get them to do that here I might be able to tolerate things.   Oh, and did I mention the homeless?  It is so sad for us to see the many homeless persons that live in the park next to our building.  It is safe to say that on any given day we will see as few as 2 and as many as 10 homeless persons sleeping and living in the park.  That is another thing we never saw in Singapore.  Not kidding.  Either there weren’t any or the city/country hid them.  With all of the homeless I am honestly more afraid for our safety.  Not to say homeless people are dangerous, but where the homeless are there also tends to be crime.  Again, another thing I never worried about in Singapore.  I felt safe walking after dark in pretty much any part of town and I knew that my family was safe.  I believe this is due to the fact that Singapore has many laws and is adamant about enforcing them.

So, you may think that we wish we could move back to Singapore since they seemed to “get so many things right”.  Not so, we are very happy here in the US!  The idea is to incorporate some of the “lessons learned” into life here like I said.  And I really do like having a yard.  Back to our reasons for moving to our little blue house.

So, a few more observations.  In Singapore I quickly found that living a chemical free life and eating organic was a difficult task.  Chemicals, I think they were everywhere.  Everyone is so afraid of germs and bad smells that everything was over scented and excessively cleaned with who knows what chemicals.  Organic choices were minimal if there were any at all and when you did find them they were typically even more expensive.  As you know Singapore was already expensive.  When we moved there I gave up organic milk, yogurt, eggs, produce etc.  We just couldn’t afford it.  At the market, where I loved to shop, nothing was marked organic, grass fed, antibiotic free etc.  (Common lingo here in the states.)  It took me a while to just let that go and hope that what I was feeding my family was healthy and safe.  Now that I am back, I have gone back to my ways of organic eating and a semi chemical free life.  I am a little more lax about it but with all of the reading I have been doing and hearing about GMOs I feel like I need to be even more diligent about things.  Why is it I worry about things so much more here?  Maybe ignorance is bliss.  Not knowing what is in your food and not having a choice about it does make things simpler, yet I would rather know.  But, what can I do about it?  That is something I have been thinking about a lot.  One solution is to have my own garden.  This is one of the things I missed the most while I was gone.  And, one of the things I look forward to most about having a yard again. 

This week will be a busy week with E’s first full week of school and the hubby and I fervently working on our little blue house with hopes to move in sooner rather than later.  Next week is the Democratic National Convention, which is to be held here in the city.  Since we are in the middle of the city I am sure there will be a lot of interesting things to tell you about.  Till next time!

You have succeeded in life when all you really want

 is only what you really need.  

~Vernon Howard

I'm just a simple guy; I live from day to day. 

A ray of sunshine melts my frown and blows my blues away.  

~Led Zeppelin "Out On The Tiles"

Behind These Walls

Living in Singapore for a year was a great experience and now that we are thrown into home improvement mania we have come to realize the good things in our Expat lives.  Life in Singapore was all about living your life.  Well, after you learn how to use public transportation, get groceries, and navigate a densely populated and culturally diverse city.  One of the things I missed most about being away from the US was having a yard and doing home improvement projects, but now that we are in it I realize how much time it takes from just having fun.  Life in Singapore was about what did to do with your day and what new experience or food did we want try.  Now, our life is about what’s on the agenda to get done and what do we need to accomplish today. Our lives have become a world of tasks and to do’s.  Is that an American thing?  I was at a point a few weeks ago where I missed my simple life in Singapore and not having an “agenda”.  And driving!  Wow, you forget how much of it you do.  It doesn’t help that we are living uptown, renovating a house 5 miles out of town and all of our friends and family live a few more miles out than that.  We are constantly buzzing around the city in our new Subaru Outback.  (We are loving our Outback BTW!)  I can’t say I like the fact that we have to drive as much as we do, but then again, I like having the time to listen to music and get caught up with NPR.  (I didn’t realize how much I missed NPR!)

So, where are we now?  We are one month into renovating our little blue house.  The first week or so we had to decide what we were going to do and what we could afford to do.  Then it became demo time.  Ripping out the kitchen felt good!  Unfortunately when the kitchen had been renovated in the 70s they built the cabinets into the kitchen.  Literally!  Getting them out was no easy task!  The hubby and my nephew had to more or less deconstruct just to get them out without pulling down the walls with them.  As they came down and our contractor started to change the walls for our new layout we discovered some interesting and not so pretty things behind those walls.  The worst was to realize all of the critters that had been living in the walls.  We even found a pile of leaves where some critter had made a nice little nest.  Unbelievable!  I got back in there and removed all of that and then some!  Pipes had to be replaced and electrical work redone.  Homes in the 40s did not have the same codes as they do now.  Not to mention homes in the 40s didn’t have all of the electrical appliances that we have now! 

One of the best finds was when we removed the wall where the fridge is going to go.  Doing this exposed the side of the fireplace.  We found a flashlight, a red stamps book with stamps, and some sort of wooden handle that we have no clue what it belonged to.  We have decided that we should put something in the fireplace nook from us, so that one-day when someone else pulls down the walls they will find our items.  Humm, what to place.  Any ideas?  Better make it fast as the walls will be sealed off soon!

We also began work on the smaller of the 2 bathrooms.  Things have been stripped down and all of the old removed.  This is the tiniest bathroom at just 3½ ft by 8 ft.  There is barely enough room in there to turn around much less have a sink, toilet, and a shower.  We almost thought about making it like the bathroom we had in the kitchen in Singapore (the helper’s bathroom) where you could shower, sit on the toilet, and brush your teeth all at the same time. Not really, but it was a funny thought! 

As I said before, we are trying to do much of the work ourselves.  What we also found out is that there is a lot that we can’t do ourselves.  We can figure out mostly anything, but it takes us sometime 5 to 10 times as long as it takes our contractor.  Yeah, well, we might not be doing everything ourselves I guess.  We naively underestimated how long it would take us to get everything done.  We were really hoping to be in our new old house by the time school starts (which is next week), but we know now that won’t happen.  To be honest, I am now hoping that we will be in there before Thanksgiving!

Oh, and the best part of it all is the shopping!  If anyone knows me I am not a mall girl and I honestly don’t like to shop for clothes etc. much.  Not my thing, but when it comes to home stuff now that is fun!  Shopping for my kitchen was great!  And let me tell you Ikea has some neat stuff.  It took 2 research trips and a lot of online planning for me to get it just right.  They had a kitchen planner come out and measure after I had done my part and with her expertise I was ready to order my new kitchen.  It is going to look great!  The cabinets are already in the house in their flat pack boxes all separated by cabinet #  (thanks to E and my sister for helping me sort and pile).  Just waiting on the floors and walls to be done so we can assemble and hang.  That will be an interesting and fun day! (Couple of days)

So, like I said the adventure continues!

Love begins at home, 

and it is not how much we do... 

but how much love we put in that action.

Mother Teresa

 Our little soon to be new, old little Blue House

Kitchen stove area before

Stove area demo

 to bedroom before

The hubby hard at work

to bedroom demo

 sink area before

 fridge area before

 from dining/living area before

from dining/living after demo and opening wall

 fridge area after demo

more wall opening

 small bath before

 shower before

after - check out that cool blue with gold specs on the old wall

 Leaf pile

Interesting fireplace findings

The Adventure Continues!

It's been a month since we have been back in the US and I figured it's time that we fill everyone in on our crazy lives.  Atleast it feels crazy to me.  Good, but crazy!


It was the last leg of our long journey back to the US and I was reading my new Better Homes and Gardens magazine on my iPad.   Patriotic pictures and articles flooded my mind.  The sadness of leaving Singapore had been replaced with all of the good things of the great USA!  Just in time for the 4th of July; one of my favorite holidays.  As the plane landed and we were all tired from the lack of sleep I couldn't help but feel light and happy in my heart.  We were home!  Now, don't get me wrong, Singapore was great and we had some amazing experiences, but the US is my home and always will be.  It was good to be back!


Our first week greeted us with amazing weather.  (70s and low humidity)  We had the windows open and I actually had to wear a sweater in the evenings.  Such a relief!  Every morning I was serenaded by a bird that must have been perched just outside the sky light in our bedroom.  After a couple of days I realized that I hadn't heard the sound of song birds in the year we were gone.  I had really missed it.  Over the course of the next few weeks I realized that birds were everywhere I went.  "Welcome back" they said!


We spent our second week back at my parents up north.  The cooler weather was even better there.  I helped my Mom prepare for our church's 73rd annual 4th of July picnic.  I fried chicken, baked pies and whipped up the most beautiful batch of cupcakes for the bake stand.  E got to play outside in the soft green grass and enjoyed setting up pretend picnics for her Grandma and Grandpa.  It was a glorious week!  We ended the trip with canoeing and the special treat of a bald eagle sighting.  Did he come out to welcome us home too?

"My Beautiful and Yummy Cupcakes"

Back in Charlotte we settled in and realized we had to figure out what we wanted to do next. The hubby was looking for a job and our goal would be for it to be out West somewhere.  Out West you might ask?  Well, since we are in transition we may as well go somewhere we wanted to be.  We have always dreamed of living out West, but it just never seemed like to right time to go.  Now is the time!  In the meantime, we knew that we need to get E in school and find a job.  We decided that while we try to get out West we needed to make the most of our time here in Charlotte.  Here is where the next part of our adventures begin.


What happens when you move to another country?  You sell your car and rent your home.  Repatriating proved to have its own set of issues. 


Luckily, we had kept our little one bedroom condo in the city.  We had a bed to sleep in and a roof over our head but, we knew that all 3 of us sleeping in one bedroom and living in 800 sq ft wasn't going to cut it for long.  We had gotten really good at living in a smaller space, but when you only have 2 rooms (not counting the bathroom) it is hard to get away from everyone.  One thing that we loved about Singapore was the fact that we could walk to things, take public transportation and ride our bikes.  As we weighed our options on where to live we really wanted to continue doing those things.  That can be hard in many parts of the city, but we had some options.  We decided to move back into my old house which we had kept as a rental property for the last 10 years.  It is located in a continually up and coming part of town.  Just down the street is a natural food store, a public park, and the light rail station.  It is only 1 1/2 miles from E's new school and has a nice large yard.  The house was originally built in the 40s and even though I had done a lot of cosmetic work while I lived there the place desperately need a face lift.  The kitchen had been redone in the early 70s and the 2 bathrooms had few improvements.  


Factor in a whole house renovation (well almost).  Our next big adventure!  We have decided to do most of the work ourselves to save money and since neither of us is working it is a good time.  Our plan includes a new kitchen, 2 new bathrooms, new floors etc. etc.  And, those are just the big things.


So, the adventure isn't over.  A new one is just beginning!  We are all excited about our new old home and are looking forward to having more space and a yard again.


Hello America!