Today was our official last day as residents in El Condominio Alta Gracia, Casa 7. We handed over the keys and the new residents sent in their painters. So, I thought it was only fitting that I pay my respects and disrespects to our house of 7 1/2 years. My "what I will miss and what I won't" is going to be a little different today. I am going to tell about what I will miss and what I will not miss about Casa 7.
I will miss driving up to a beautiful entryway and the door opening for me as if I were someone super special. I will miss saying hello and goodbye to our full time guards every time I arrive at or leave from my house. And the security of knowing that someone is always there watching out for me. I will miss the little playground beside of our house and all of the fun memories that I have of our kids playing with their little spanish friends. I will miss being the only mom outside playing with my kids among several other kids and their nannies. (Yes, I often hung out with all the nannies of the condo) I will miss being able to step out of my front door and count on the fact that I will probably see and stop and visit with one of my neighbors, one of the guards or one of the workers (and usually in varying languages- english, spanish, guarani and portunol as I call it).
I will miss living in a very modern looking house that made me smile every time I drove up. I will miss living in a house that had the most beautiful wooden doors throughout the entire house. I will miss having a giant glass door that took up one entire wall in my living room. And especially the fact that it usually had a view of the neighbors blooming flowers hanging down over the wall. I will miss having a house full of tile. There is nothing like spraying down your entire floor with water and then using a squeegie to push the water right out the door or right into a drain built into the floor just for that purpose. I will miss my bright yellow walls in my living room. I will miss looking out my back windows and seeing the most beautiful tropical flowers in the world. I will miss having a built-in grill on my back porch with it's own little chimney. I will miss our fireplace that we huddled around during cold days and nights to keep warm. And I will miss knowing that I am living in the house where we brought all three of our sweet children home to from the hospital. We have truly felt blessed by being able to live in this house for our entire time in Paraguay!
However, this house that sounds fabulous (and it was), also had it's flaws. I will not miss the fact that the beautiful glass door in our living room weighed a ton and never worked correctly. It required a lot of effort to open and the fact that our dog had to go outside to use the bathroom meant that it had to be opened various times throughout the day. I will not miss the fact that every few days some sort of plumbing broke in our house. From toilets to hot water heaters to bidets to sinks, something was always breaking and spewing water all over the place. (Thankfully we had those tile floors!) I will not miss an air conditioner that rains water on my floor even after it has been fixed vairious times. I will not miss the huge water stained wall by my front window that we had fixed 4 or 5 times and finally gave up. I will not miss being in an entirely tile house when it is wintertime in Paraguay. Tile does not heat up unless it has a direct heat source. And it did not! And it was very, very cold in our house! I will not miss bathrooms that do not have any source of heat or air conditioning. I was always either freezing or burning up in all of our bathrooms. I will not miss having a laundry room with an open ceiling. My clothes often either got rained on, pooped on by pigeons or were the recipients of colorful flower petals falling from the trees above. And my laundry room was never clean because the dust, dirt, bird poop, bugs and flowers always found their way in there! I will not miss houses that are not sealed up. I never grew to understand the 2 inch gaps under my doors leading to the outdoors. Mosquitos and dust were a constant in our lives and our home. And I will certainly not miss having to rub bug repelent on my children and myself every single night before we went to bed. I will not miss the dust! Huge volumes and amounts of very black dust. I am still amazed at just how much dust gets into the homes in Paraguay. It is impossible to keep clean! And if you don't keep it clean- you have a black film on everything in your house! And the dust bunnies. They are as big as some pets. And I will not miss not being able to use certain areas (fairly important areas) of our house depending on the weather. I have grown to appreciate central heat and air! And while on that topic- I will not miss using floor fans and space heaters to be able to survive the climate inside my house. I will not miss having to use converters for all of my kitchen appliances. I will not miss having scary lighting systems throughout the house. There would be weeks when it would get to the point that we did not have a single working light bulb in our downstairs. So, we would change all of the bulbs and within 3 or 4 hours, most of them would be not working again. And some of the globes would just fall out of the little metal socket and then we would have to clean up shattered glass. And then sometimes the bulbs would break off in the sockets and we couldn't get them out. So, then that light wouldn't work anymore. And the week we were moving out, one of the light bulbs just fell out of the ceiling and was hanging by a wire. I will not miss those lights! I will not miss the fact that most of the door handles in our house had broken and were falling off the doors. And I will not miss having to worry about hot water heaters that were famous for exploding. And one was in our bathroom, one was above Olivia's bedroom and one was in our laundry room. And every other house in the condominium had their water heaters explode. Yikes! We are thankful for that! And I will not miss renting from people who never fixed the things that were broken in your house! And there were a lot of broken things!
I kind of wish that we could have moved out of Casa 7 several years ago and then re-rented it so that they would have fixed it up again for us! Casa 7 - I am curious to see what I truly miss about you and what I won't. Especially when I am sitting in my new house and enjoying the luxury of central heat and air!
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