However, the place was in a pretty sad shape when we moved in. So, we made it our project to do some fixing up. We wanted to leave it looking better than it was when we got it.
Anyways, here are some cool pics that can help you understand the changes we made to our home.
Tyler unlocking our door for the first time.
We thought it would be wise to make changing the lock the first thing we did when we arrived.
This is our room. We are so thankful our friend Jimmy from chruch provided a clean rug and a new sofa.
Our bathroom started off this way, but thanks to Tyler's talent with a paintbrush and a great deal of help from our friend Dale this bathroom has had a nice facelift. It is no longer blue, but a nice clean white.
The water stains on the wall were the hardest to deal with. No matter how many coats of paint went over it, the stain kept coming through. Fortunately, we found out about this great stuff that keeps stain from showing, that fixed our problem pretty quickly.
Here is a good shot of how the kitchen looked when we got there. We got rid of that cabinet sitting on the floor. I was happy to see it in the dumpster. Doing this provided some walking room.
We started our kitchen project by cleaning the floor. It was especially a good thing we moved the fridge, 'cause there was a family of cockroaches living here.
We started to clean the dirt off of wallpaper and thought it just might be easier to tear it all down and paint. We never thought that we would find newspaper underneath. Crazy! Apparently, newspaper is commonly used in Russia to even out the wall before laying down the wall paper.
Here Tyler is just scraping away at the wall paper. It didn't come off as easily as expected.
We were not happy to see what kind of ads were in the paper. It is a sad thing, but this page in the paper was all for abortion advertisements. Russia has the highest number of abortions per woman of child-bearing age in the world according to UN data. Please pray for Russia!
Our awesome friend, Dale. He was really helpful in remodeling the kitchen. He mudded all the walls and gave the kitchen its new foundation. Thanks Dale!!
This is a look at the final product. Pastor Dean put in a new faucet and a "tumba" or sink cabinet. Dale and Tyler moved the cabinet to hang over the sink and painted the walls a pristine white. Looks so good now!
Oh, and we put down a fresh new carpet from IKEA-a great finishing touch : )We want to thank God for our friends Jimmy & Svyeta who rented this apartment to us. We also are so thankful to the Lord for His graciousness in providing financially for us through Tyler's work which has allowed us to make all the changes here.
