Spend some nice time and help us rebuilding an old house and barn in east-Germany

Location: Jessen, Germany

Hello dear people!

We are a couple, Efrem (born as Portuguese) and Ilja (born as Dutch).
We are living in a small village called Schweinitz, about 80Km south of Berlin. We have been living here now for around one and a half year (before that we lived for some years more in the south of Germany and before that in Portugal).
It is an old house with a barn, some land and a little bit of forest. The land and the house still need quite a bit of love and attention to make it a nicer place to live in :-)
When we arrived here there was no kitchen, a very old bathroom and some rooms. We now have a kitchen and a bit nicer bathroom but there is still a lot to do. We transformed the piece of forest that you couldn’t really enter because of the brambles in to a nice little corner. From there you can walk to the river that is behind our land.
And we started to make an organic vegetable and flower and (medicinal)herbs garden last spring and summer.

We have a small theatre company and play theatre-circus shows mainly for children and families (if you like it, you can see more about that on our website: www.projectoanagrama.org )

Besides that, we have lots of different interests and we love to keep on learning and exploring life, trying to somehow find out what this is all about :-)

We use to be a lot on the road traveling with the camper van that we have build ourselves as well.

If you feel like spending some time with us, we are very happy to receive you.
We like to share our skills, things we have learned by doing and learning things from other people. We love to travel and to meet new people, and being able to receive travelers at our home when we are not traveling ourselves is a great way of sharing and some extra hands to help around are always welcome :-)

WORKING ARRANGEMENT

The kind of work we will be doing in and around the house the upcoming months is probably some projects in the house and the barn, using eco-construction techniques but also any kind of creative solutions to re-shape the place, using skills from carpentry to plumbing and electricity related work (we have experience in all of them and you don’t need to have those skills yourself, when you are happy to learn and help around you can learn a lot together with us :-) )

We are probably going to plaster the wall of a room (with lime plaster, we are thinking about making it a bit more artistic than just plane straight walls…), and to put a wooden floor in some rooms (we have made boards out of some oak trees that came down with a storm, it has been a great adventure to cut the boards :-) , now the boards are waiting to be transformed in a wooden floor)…

There is also going to be garden work and some forest maintenance work.

About the hours of work per day and week: we are easy-going :-)
We are enthusiastic about the stuff we are doing and see working as having fun at the same time, but we also like to take free time, no day is the same as the other, we are not very routine-like. So don’t worry, there will be no strict schedules.

Although your cultural experience over here will be in Germany, you will have a mixed Portugees-Dutch-German experience :-)
You can improve any of these languages here, as well as Spanish and English if you like.

We have a nice lake at 3Km from our home where we use to go for a swim, it has a nice sand beach. We also have a canoe and the river with beavers and some nice waterbirds is just around the corner.

We have bicycles available and possibilities for cycling in our area.

The nearest train-station is 6km (Holzdorf) and there goes a train to Berlin there. We are happy to drive there to bring or pick you up from the train-station

LIVING ARRANGEMENT

We offer a basic caravan for you for staying over here (for a single or a couple) or a tent in our garden. If you are traveling in a van, you are also very welcome, we have space in our garden for parking and camping.
We offer meals (mainly biological) that we will enjoy together.