Our house

Our new house

There are always new things to figure out when you move into a new home.  Moving to a new home in a new country is even more challenging.  Here are some of the different things about our house:

Of course the outlets are different.  They use 220V like the UK, so none of our appliances will work over here.  Also, the light switches are much smaller.

Light switch (with dimmer) and air conditioner remote

Instead of having central air, we have an air conditioner with a remote in each room.  I actually really like this feature.  It gets really hot here and it is nice during the day to be able to turn the air up and close the door in the living room when the kids and I are playing and not to have to cool the rest of the house.  The same thing at night, we can cool the bedrooms down without paying to cool the rest of the house we aren't using.  We saw this system in almost all of the houses/apartments we looked at when we came in November.  I am not sure if they do it this way because it is cheaper/easier than running duct work or if it is because it is considered more desirable.

Air conditioner unit

                                                           

There is a switch in our kitchen to turn the water heater on and off to our sink.  At first, I thought this was really strange.  We have a small, instantaneous hot water heater that works just for the kitchen sink (there are 2 others that are for the master bath and kids' bath).  We don't have a dishwasher, so we definitely need hot water to wash dishes.  When you turn on the hot water, you can hear the gas firing and the hot water heater starting up.  The switch is actually nice because you can turn it off when you are finished doing dishes and you don't have to waste gas when you turn on the sink to get a drink or wash your hands and the nozzle isn't all the way on cold.

Our kitchen is very small.  Our refrigerator is very small, less than half the size of my one at home.  It also, as well as the ones I saw at the appliance store, has a top freezer, middle refrigerator and bottom vegetable drawer.  A small fridge is another reason I will have to go to the grocery store so frequently.

Also, apparently most Chinese do not use an oven.  They cook everything on the stove top, mainly in a wok.  Therefore my oven is very low end.  My oven doesn't have any temperatures on it.  It has one knob that points to a bunch of different squiggly lines which I am assuming mean things like broil, bake, convect, although I don't have a manual and a lot of the symbols have rubbed off.  It has a second knob that is a timer and a third knob that regulates temperature.  It has a picture of a thermometer and that is it. There are no markings or numbers.  I thought the biggest challenge I would find with baking would be converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit, I never imagined my oven wouldn't tell me ANY temperatures.  I made some enchiladas the other night and I definitely didn't have the oven hot enough.  Luckily, they just needed to be heated and nothing really had to cook.  I don't know how I feel about cooking meat in the oven.  It will be interesting when I try to bake Charlotte's birthday cake later this summer.  I will have to find some sort of thermometer to put in the oven.

Oven knobs.  The middle one is the temperature.

                                          

They pick up our trash twice a day.  Yes, twice a DAY.  I thought for sure she meant week when she told me, but someone comes around in the morning and evening to pick up trash.  You just put it outside your gate.  This has been great because I never have to worry about the trash smelling and since they don't recycle in our neighborhood (I have seen a few recycling trash cans in the city, but it is not prevalent here), we actually have quite a bit of trash each day.

We had to buy our own blinds/curtains.  Even though many people have lived in our house before us, there are no coverings on any of the windows.  Apparently it is standard for each person to have to put up their own blinds or curtains.  We had our curtains installed today and I am really excited because there is a huge street light right outside our bedroom window and it has felt like I have been sleeping with a spotlight in my eyes each night.  It also gets light outside at 5:30 AM, so it will be nice to not have the sun wake me up quite so early. 

We also had to buy our own washing machine.  Apparently most Chinese would not want to use someone's old machine.  For hygienic reasons they get a new one each time.  Therefore, a landlord will not provide a washer.  We went to the appliance store and they had probably 20 or so washers and only 1 dryer.  Most people here, as well as many in Europe, do not use dryers,  They line dry everything.  They did have combination washer/dryers, but the dryer could only dry half as many clothes as the washer could wash, so when the wash cycle was finished you had to stop and get half the clothes out before you could dry them. I decided not to get that and to try just having a washer.  Our new washer got installed today and we had lots of dirty clothes, so I did 4 loads of laundry.  I had problems finding places to hang them all.  (My clothes drying rack and ALL of our hangers are in our shipment.  I tried to get another drying rack, but that was one of the things I haven't been able to find.)  Also, there is only 1 outlet out by the washer, so I have to unplug the hot water heaters for the bathrooms to be able to plug in the washer.  Hopefully, I don't forget to plug the hot water heaters back in before someone wants to take a shower.  :)

Washing machine with hot water heaters above.  You can see the 1 outlet they share on the wall.

                

There are some things that are not different here.  Our washer was scheduled to be delivered between 12 and 4 and they showed up around 4:30.  They also forgot one of our items.  :)