styro-home

So this is another on-the-late-side post, but recently, seven months after first setting up the scaffolding, the grand completion of encasing our apartment block in styro-foam was completed. Why styro-foam, you ask? Well, not because they want to send the whole building by freight, if your first guess was the same as mine. But for insulation. Insulation done one huge, soft exterior panel at a time. It's communist condominium facelift craze that's sweeping the former Eastern bloc.

There are few things that we will miss now that construction is over:

1. the surprise appearance of construction workers immediately outside our 6th story kitchen and bedroom windows at any time of the day
2. the soft serenade of electric drills on Saturday mornings
3. pointing out our house by telling people "it's the one with scaffolding"
4. the gentle lapping of the painters' plastic sheets against our windows
5. the soft temperature-non-specific snowfall of little bits of styrofoam

But now that it's finished and our building (at least our half of it, pictured on the right) boasts a warm, cheerful and rather stylish (for a concrete apartment block) facade, we have to agree that it was all worth it. And it makes a funny sound when you knock on it. Pity that we have just two months to enjoy it.