Wooden walls

We realized that a lot of our budget for converting Oswald into our cozy home will be needed for wood. So we’ve been searching for ways of saving money on that. Luckily, Tim knows a carpenter who was ready to help. He ordered pretty fancy wood for Oswald’s walls for a really good deal. A big thanks to Thomas here! On Thursday we drove up to Flensburg, which is nearly 200km away from Hamburg, to pick the wood up.

Oswald is parked at Felix’s parents place most of the time, so we started from there to Flensburg. Kindly, Matthias and Claudia made some room for us in their carport so we can build there. I guess it’s time to say thanks a lot at this point: for the chance to use all this space, for your hospitality and for all the good food 🙂

This trip was a pretty crazy adventure! Felix decided to put in the second roof hatch just before we started driving up to Thomas’s machine shop in Flensburg. You can read more about the hatch actions here. There was no time left to seal the second hatch before the drive – you see where this is going? Well, we did not see it coming, unfortunately.

We used the time driving those 1 ½ hours to talk about our social media ideas. We were debating about this blog (what are our goals with it? Still a good question. We hope at least you guys are well entertained) and about our Instagram account (what do we want to achieve with it? At least we found an easy answer here: our goal is to give you a step-by-step idea of our conversion, to share portraits of people who are helping us, to build a community and to show our friends during our travels what we are up to). Besides that, we talked about the next steps in the construction. So the time flew fast, we arrived in Flensburg, picked up the wood and it started to rain on our way to Thomas’s machine shop. So, all of a sudden we needed to hurry, and as soon as we arrived at Thomas’s place Felix climbed up the roof and tried to seal the hatch as well as somehow possible.

We spent some hours with Thomas, cutting the wood and sanding it.

Tim and Felix cutting wood in Thomas’ machine shop.

When we wanted to bring the wood into the van, we realized that rain dripped through the roof. Big panic! We tried to manage what we could in that very moment and drove back to Hamburg. With all the chaos, the general mood was more or less depressed. In the end, we were happy to arrive back in the city, went to bed and hoped that the next day would bring some brighter moments. Well, it didn’t. Actually, we got into our first argument about the whole process of our conversion. I guess this is part of the whole project we started. There won’t only be good and happy moments. The most important part, we decided in the end, is that we will never stop being completely honest with each other. Of course, you won’t always find a solution for every conflict of opinions but in the end, it’s important to hear the others’ struggles and at least try to understand their points of view. I am sure that we are doing well with that, so far. And in the end, probably all of those conflicts and solutions we find will bring us closer together.