Home Improvement

It's home repair month in the UmmFarouq household.

Yippeeee.

One of the biggest flaws (do you have six hours?) in the home building process in Jordan is the conspicuous lack of insulation in the walls.

While I have never actually witnessed workers do this, I have heard that a thin piece of styrofoam is placed between the bald cement block and the finishing slab of whatever it is that they put over it before they paint it. I'm talking about, oh, a thickness of 3 centimeters or so. Of styrofoam.

Sure, that Dixie cup will keep us cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The other day when the temperature soared to ridiculousness, we felt as if we were sitting inside a clay oven.

Cement blocks are also very porous, which allows moisture to build up within them and then leak out into places like one's living room, which has been painted and scraped two times within the past three years.

We have begun our third scraping o' the walls. The painter was here yesterday and I'm expecting him again any moment. This time, we've opted to have a bunch of natural stone (from a local quarry!) siliconed to our walls to prevent any more moisture from leaking through to ruin the paint job. It might be hard to visualize. Once it's done, perhaps I'll snap a pic or two for your perusal.

Maybe, just maybe, buildings and homes could be built better if someone cared about the workers' feet. Can you imagine construcion workers in the US building what they build, wearing only flip-flops? We need a steel-toed boot drive for all Egyptian workers in Jordan.

Somehow I managed to pack and lift and load and weigh and haul all 520 pounds of stuff I brought with me from the states, without hurting my back. Yesterday, however, I threw it out just moving a coffee table across the room. Muscle relaxer, anyone?