Today was another of those days when the renovation of our house managed to consume a substantial part of the day without us actually doing anything that would look particularly dramatic in a photograph.
There was no new wall appearing, no roof disappearing and no major piece of construction machinery involved. Instead, we moved boxes, cleaned things, threw old things away, tested the new dishwasher and generally tried to transform another small part of a construction project into something that begins to resemble a home.
These days are less spectacular than the major stages of a renovation, but I am beginning to think they are just as important. There comes a point when a renovated house has to stop being a collection of completed building jobs and start becoming a place where we can actually live.
The kitchen finally starts becoming a kitchen
We had quite a lot of kitchenware stored away in boxes, some of it for a very long time. Today we started moving a good part of it into the new kitchen.
That also provided the first serious test for the small dishwasher we installed there.
Many of the items had spent so long in storage that they needed considerably more than a quick rinse before I was prepared to put them into a cupboard. Instead of standing at the sink washing everything individually, we loaded batches into the dishwasher and let it do the work.
It is a small thing, but it was satisfying. Installing an appliance during a renovation is one stage. Actually filling it with dirty dishes and pressing the button is quite another. It means that part of the house has crossed the line from construction into use.
At the same time, I continued one of my less sophisticated renovation activities: throwing things away.
Renovation has a strange tendency to expose the accumulated archaeology of a household. Boxes contain things that once seemed important, things kept because they might perhaps be useful one day, and things nobody can quite remember why they were kept in the first place.
After enough years, the most useful destination for some of them is the rubbish.
By the time we finished, the area was cleaner, the kitchen was more functional and several boxes had finally disappeared.
Then I looked at the two sheds differently
While working outside, I also started looking again at the two small sheds we have on the property.
Until now I had mostly regarded them simply as existing outside structures: useful, certainly, but not something that deserved much attention while the main house still needed so much work.
Today I realised that they could be considerably more useful than they are now.
With some sensible protection against moisture and water ingress, together with some insulation where appropriate and relatively simple cosmetic work on the walls, they could become proper storage rooms rather than places where things are merely deposited.
That opens several possibilities.
We could keep tools there, household items that we do not need every day and various supplies that would otherwise occupy space inside the house. More importantly, they could become a useful pantry for the considerable amount of food that comes to us from Vita's parents.
Their land produces plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, and there are always preserved vegetables, jars and other food prepared for storage. At the moment these things have a tendency to end up wherever we can find space.
There is no particular reason why all of that needs to occupy valuable space inside the house if we can create a clean, dry and properly organised storage area outside.
And then, of course, there is wine.
I can already see one of the sheds becoming at least partly dedicated to it. Calling it a wine cellar would be premature: an outside shed in Moldova can experience rather different conditions in summer and winter, and wine deserves something more stable than a room that bakes in July and freezes in January. If I want to use it seriously for wine, controlling moisture and temperature variation will have to be part of the project.
But the basic idea is now firmly planted.
Apparently finishing one renovation project is also an excellent way of discovering the next one.
A dangerous visit to Kaufland
On the way back, we stopped at Kaufland to buy cleaning products and a few other things that we will need on our next visit to the house.
This should have been a completely unremarkable supermarket stop.
Unfortunately, a Moldovan wine tasting started almost exactly when we arrived.
Obviously, I am a strong supporter of the local economy.
I therefore felt a certain civic responsibility to volunteer.
There were six different wines available for tasting: white, rosé and red. It would have been terribly unfair to evaluate only one or two of them, so in the interests of methodological consistency I tasted all six.
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
One of the discoveries was the Barriquello range from Impresario. The bottle I brought home was a Barriquello Cuvée Rouge Syrah, labelled as a dry red Moldovan wine with an oak influence.
I had not paid much attention to the brand before, but after the tasting I became curious enough to look into it properly.
Impresario is slightly different from the conventional picture of a winery built around one estate and its own vineyards. It developed from wine-industry expertise and presents itself as a Moldovan wine-creation project, working with wines and winemakers from around the country to create its own ranges and assemblages. Barriquello is specifically one of its collections built around the interaction between wine, oak and maturation.
That actually makes it more interesting to me.
Living in Moldova, it is very easy to see bottles on supermarket shelves without knowing anything about the people, places and ideas behind them. Then one random tasting turns a label into something I want to investigate further.
I also learned during the discussion that the people behind the wine are much more local to us than I had realised. That means another item has now appeared on the list: I want to find out where we can visit them properly and taste the wines in their own environment rather than encountering them accidentally between household-cleaning products and the supermarket checkout.
Naturally, after conducting such extensive support for the Moldovan wine industry, I bought several bottles.
Marmelada, cheese and Brazil
Just after arriving back at Vita's parents' house, while we were organising the groceries from Kaufland, I had another surprise.
There was a large pot of real marmelada, made at home from marmelos — quinces picked from the trees in their own back garden.
That immediately transported me back to my childhood in Brazil.
Marmelada com queijo. Marmelada with cheese.
It was such a familiar combination and it brought back so many good memories. For a moment I was not thinking about renovations, Moldova, supermarkets or anything else. I was remembering being a little boy in Brazil and eating essentially the same thing.
There was something almost absurdly wonderful about it. Here I was in Moldova, on what from a Brazilian perspective feels like the other side of the planet, eating homemade marmelada made from fruit growing just outside the house.
I do not mean that the two countries are somehow the same. They obviously are not. I mean something much more personal: the rhythm of life, food coming directly from someone's garden, fruit trees behind the house, jars and preserves made at home, relatives bringing vegetables, and ordinary things being kept and used instead of everything arriving packaged, branded and disconnected from where it came from.
These are things I remember very strongly from Brazil when I was growing up.
Modern Brazil has changed enormously since then, as has almost everywhere else. Yet every so often Moldova gives me one of these strange flashes of recognition. Something happens that feels completely new because I am living in another country, another culture and another part of the world — and at exactly the same time it feels remarkably familiar.
Today's marmelada was one of those moments.
Finally, an afternoon without construction
Eventually we had a little time to relax.
Our choice of relaxation consisted of watching some suitably violent films while I opened one of the local red wines I had just acquired.
After spending the day carrying boxes, cleaning old kitchenware, throwing rubbish away and mentally redesigning two outside sheds that were not even supposed to be today's project, sitting down with a glass of Moldovan red wine felt entirely justified.
And once the wine was finished, I returned to my normal form of relaxation: family-tree research.
Some people finish a long day by making sure that absolutely nothing remains capable of requiring concentration. Apparently I prefer to spend the evening examining old documents, names, dates and family relationships.
But I enjoy it.
The house is slowly becoming ours
Looking back, today was not an important renovation day in the conventional sense.
Nothing enormous changed.
But the kitchen became slightly more like our kitchen. Some old clutter disappeared. Two neglected sheds suddenly became part of a future plan. Food from Vita's parents now has the beginnings of a sensible storage solution. I discovered another Moldovan wine producer that I want to explore.
And somewhere between the supermarket bags and the bottles of wine, a pot of homemade marmelada managed to connect a back garden in Moldova with my childhood in Brazil more than fifty years ago.
Perhaps this is actually what the later stages of renovating a home look like.
At first the questions are structural: walls, floors, roofs, electricity, plumbing, insulation and money.
Gradually the questions become more personal: Where will we put this? What should we keep? How do we use that space? Where should the tools go? Where do we store all the jars of preserved vegetables?
And, naturally, where am I going to keep the wine?
But there is something else happening as well. The longer I live here, the less Moldova feels simply like the country where we decided to make our home. Increasingly, small details connect it with places and periods of my own life that I thought were long gone.
Today it was marmelada and cheese.
Those are much better problems — and much better surprises — to have.
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