My blog

It was 1999. My high school friend and I decided to become neighbors. My mom found a building site. She didn't need a real estate agency for that. She explored the area we lived in on foot. She asked every farmer within a five-kilometer radius of our apartment in the Grapa housing estate in Konstancin if he had any land to sell.

Our plots – my thousand-meter plot and my friend’s one thousand four hundred-meter plot – were located in the middle of an old orchard, nine hundred meters long and fifty meters wide, bisected along by a narrow, four-meter-wide, one-way, unpaved road, unnamed, called Księżycowa Street by the residents of the village of Chyliczki, which perfectly reflected the atmosphere and landscape of the area.

The prices of plots at that time, although they had already rebounded from their cheapness, had not yet managed to skyrocket – we paid $25 per meter for ours.

We started by naming our street. I never thought I would live at an address that I would come up with myself. With the name, we wanted to blend in smoothly with the area. However, it wasn't easy, because how can you decide whether to draw from our national heritage, like the neighboring Moniuszki Street to the west, or to go for a cosmic atmosphere, like the neighboring Gwiaździsta and Słoneczna Streets to the east? The practical argument prevailed. Throughout your entire life, you enter your address in countless forms. For your own convenience, it would be good if the street name had as few characters as possible. So we decided on "Bacha".

Unfortunately, the clerk at the district office turned out not to be an enthusiast of German baroque music. It turned out that there was already a Bach Street in the Piaseczno district. So I had to think of something on hand. And so I chose Letnia Street. As it turned out later, less than three kilometres from my house there is another Letnia Street in a town with a similar name – Chylice, which is why pizza or Zalando delivery people often call me saying they can't find my house because they're standing on the wrong Letnia Street.

The next step was the architectural design. Our architect, like a good psychotherapist, recognized our habits and listened to our preferences over the course of several sessions. I, raised in a forty-meter apartment, had two key requirements. A simple roof covered with tiles and space for a twelve-person dining table. The architect quickly came up with two designs - a smaller one for me and a larger one for a neighbor who, for as long as I can remember, has been guided in life by the principle of "always have more than your neighbor." The drawings of our houses in the designs looked impressive and stylish - mine like a barn - in my neighbor's opinion and the neighbor's like a fire station - in my opinion.

The hardest part was ahead of us. We had to find a construction team. At that time, it wasn't difficult if you could afford to spend a lot of money, which we wanted to avoid. And here my mother-in-law appeared, offering us a team from Lithuania led by her cousin. We took advantage of the offer.

They came to Poland at the beginning of July 1999. There were four of them. They didn't seem to know anything about construction, but since they had already arrived, it was hard to refuse. The problem was that they spoke only Lithuanian, which made any communication very difficult, or rather impossible. We had to draw the contract using the pictorial method, which was quite a challenge for me, a person with no artistic talent. Somehow, however, I managed to draw two houses on a piece of paper in an open shell state, signed for the amount of 9,000 US dollars, because they seemed to understand what their job was supposed to consist of.
I remember exactly - the excavator dug into the ground on my plot of land on July 7, 1999. Four Lithuanians finished the shells of two houses by mid-December, traveling to Lithuania several times for a few days of rest. We were still pouring the ceiling in my house in August. "Uzh piardanga", which in Lithuanian means "for the ceiling", is deeply etched in my memory thanks to the Lithuanian moonshine we used to celebrate this stage of construction.

Apart from digging the foundations, bricklaying, pouring the ceilings, assembling the roof truss and nailing down the roofing felt, I did everything on the construction site myself. Every morning before work I would come to the construction site to give instructions to my foremen, and in the evening I would check on the progress. I would drive around to construction stores to get supplies. I gained my knowledge from Murator. I was an informal construction manager. The formal one came to the construction site once. He climbed a ladder, stuck his head just above the ceiling and signalled to the concrete mixer operator that he could pour the concrete.
The Lithuanians topped out the building in September and moved to the neighboring construction site.

After the winter, I started finishing the house. From March to November, during the finishing works, dozens of contractors passed through the construction site, most of them complaining about their predecessors and leaving much to be desired in terms of quality.
I remember best the electrician whom I spent a lot of time persuading to run the cables to the light switches at American height – much lower than in Poland, so that the children could turn on the lights themselves. When I arrived at the construction site to pick up his work, I found that the cables were attached at a standard height and I asked the guy why he had done otherwise than we had agreed. To which he replied with disarming honesty that he had come to the conclusion that it would be better this way.

I wouldn't say a bad word about the plumber who installed hot water in the toilet flush, and led the water to the bedroom through an uninsulated pipe, thanks to which I still have a simple and practical temperature gauge outside. If I can't brush my teeth in the morning because there's no water, I don't have to look at the thermometer to know that it's below -18 degrees Celsius outside. And when I was accepting the water installation, I noticed that the left end of the 1.5-meter radiator in one of the bedrooms was seven centimeters from the floor, and the right end was fifteen centimeters. When I asked what this surprising solution was for, my plumber replied that it would make it easier for the water to drain.

And so, just before the holidays of 2000, we moved into our new house, and I was able to check off the second of those three things every man should do.