Rants from the Hollow

You’d think that home repairs would be pretty much the same everywhere, but this turns out not to be the case. There are lots of differences in construction convention, and when you don’t grow up there, home repairs become very mysterious.

Take something simple like drilling holes in a wall. In America, the walls are all made of a sort of solidified cottage cheese, covered with heavy paper. You can drill a hole in a wall with a toothpick. Moving to Austria in ‘01, I had this romantic and eventually frustrated notion that I’d be traveling all over the continent, buying gourmet organic hand tools the likes of which you just couldn’t get in America. The few I’ve found, like PB, a Swiss brand of screwdrivers that are made like surgical instruments, are now available in the US, so where’s the prestige value of that? (www.pbtools.us/)

We arrived in Vienna without furniture, a temporary situation that resulted in two marathon 8+ hours in IKEA (I’ve spent hours in business meetings speaking German, but still don’t know how to fluently say “My wife says that your other store has a removable cover for that couch in a darker shade of gray with a heavier texture.” What’s the word for couch? Davendingsbumm?) Suffering from chronic tendinitis (see subject Computers Will Break Your Heart), one of my first metric tool purchases was a rechargeable Bosch drill and a set of screwdriver and hex bits. If you’re going to do a lot of screwing, you gotta have the right tool.

The drill worked well until Elizabeth wanted me to put a hanging on the wall. Our apartment was in a lovely and newly renovated building that, unlike some of its neighbors in the neunzehnten Bezirk, had lived through the war quite nicely. Teutonic speakers like to build things to last, and apparently this one was especially Teutonic. My first attempt to drill a hole with the cheapie twist drill from the DIY store barely put a dent in the wall. So I tried a smaller bit and I pushed harder, which snapped it off. So I got wise, and bought a masonry bit. The walls still could have been made out of diamond, for all the good I could do using my suddenly feeble ni-cad powered hand tool.

After a couple weeks of complaints that I wasn’t fulfilling my husbandly role of drilling holes in walls, I found a used 1-HP Binford hammer drill. 220Volts!! Man, I HAMMERED those walls. First the white dust came out, then the red dust came out, and then your drill bit bottomed out. ZOOM! I quickly ran out of holes to drill, and only used that drill in Austria one more time. I did try it on an IKEA project, but the screw went in one side of the shelf and right back out the other. Swedish pine just doesn’t need as heavy a touch as Austrian cement.

I pretty much kept my hand off the electricals in that apartment, in contrast to my later experiences in England. In order to touch anything electrical in Austria, you need to be a Diplom Ingeneur. Unless you’re from Yugoslavia and paid in cash–then you’re allowed to do anything. We’d never get anything done without a constant string of moonlighting guest workers. In Austria, your apartment doesn’t come with light fixtures–you have to wire them in yourself. From a wife’s point of view, this is a marvelous opportunity to go shopping. From a husband’s point of view, this is a royal pain in the ass. I guess I should consider myself lucky that we didn’t have to install the entire kitchen, which is not uncommon.

We were the first ones to move into the apartment, so there were some repairs and projects already in process under the sponsorship of Frau Magister Doktor Zimm, our landlord. More than once I came home to find Elizabeth and some Yugoslavian guy, neither of whom spoke much German, pointing at the electrical or plumbing diagrams in a Duden Bildwörterbuch (picture dictionary), each with a half-finished bottle of Stiegl beer.

Not only were the ceilings higher than my ladder, but I admit that the electronics of the place were mystifying. The wires weren’t the colors and configuration I was used to in America, all the fixtures where lights were supposed to attach were different than American fittings. Being 220V, you would be twice as dead if you grabbed a bare wire and jumped into the bathtub. Of course, you can’t do that most of Europe, because they even put the light switches outside the bath, just to make it that much harder to electrocute yourself.

In another of the gross contrasts with our upcoming English experience, the electrical panel was of 21st century design. A gleaming, blinking example of Teutonic technical glory, it apparently ran itself, because I never had to touch the thing, which was good, because it had no instructions.

The floor heater in the kitchen had no instructions, either. An extremely minimalist, it only had one button on it, although the temperature could be controlled to a precise degree on a rotating schedule based on a clock and calendar. Elizabeth cracked the code before Frau Magister Doktor did, subsequently waking up every morning to toasty feet. The lack of instructions were probably an advantage in this case.

Unfortunately, the economy didn’t really cooperate, and I called a premature end to our Austrian experiment in Sept 2001, when I found a new job in London. This turned out to be a huge opportunity to learn all sorts of new things about DIY.