Half a century of history removed...

No, it's nothing horrible. We're simply doing some much-needed renovations on the house. In particular we're tending to the windows.

It all started a month or so ago when we re-painted one of the old casement windows (and yes, we did also paint the frame, not just the panes ;-), which is still made up of two windows with single-pane glass. One of the sides of the outer casement refused to come off, so we had to paint with that still in place.

Now, in recent weeks, we've started taking the shutters off the windows to give them a new paint job. This of course included using a piece of rope to secure each shutter as a classmate of my father's half hung out the window to get the shutter off its hinges, which usually worked without the help of a chisel for leverage (I'm happy to say that the neighbor's car underneath the window didn't have to prove how reinforced the passenger cell really is).

Then we'd roughly strip some of the paint off the wood and cement any holes after liberally sprinkling them with worm-ex. Then we'd use sand paper to smoothen the surface a little more. On this occasion we came across a number of nails (i.e.: Ouch), which obviously had no function besides sticking out of the wood. Apparently, they are from before we'd moved in, and were used in the war during air raids to attach covers to the shutters to keep in the light.

Regardless of any historical value, we pulled most of them out, repainted and now some of them are already back in their places. But it does feel kind of weird to imagine that such a simple thing as a nail in a piece of wood would have such a story. But that's Europe to you: a brush with history at every turn of the street...

... and now let's read some more on Internet Technology so Christian won't have to do all the talking when we're back to learning tomorrow.