Good Riddance

I thought it might be useful to write down a bunch of the things that I will not miss, after we've moved from The Zolder. Perhaps it will come across as a bit of an exercise in "sour grapes" -- but I think it can be helpful to remember some of the not-so-good things about a place from which we'll actually be grateful to get away. Here's a few of the things that came to my mind:

• 55 steps from street level to the main meeting space. The exercise was good, and the attic space was gezellig -- but it's not always so gezellig to arrive for worship out of breath and sweating mildly...
• The broken buzzer. This is compounded by the 55 steps from street level to the main meeting space. Sometimes, a meeting among four people could end up meaning four different trips up and down the stairs to let everyone in...
• Electrical overload. I'd be curious to hear from someone like Arienne or Michael, who would have more personal experience from having served as gastvrouw/gastheer throughout the years, but it seems that blown fuses were a weekly (if not more frequent) occurence in the kitchen of the Zolder...
• The idle dishwasher. Go figure: we had a perfectly functioning dishwashing machine in the kitchen, and we had hundreds of used cups and mugs to be washed within the space of a few hours on Sunday afternoons and evenings -- but we almost never combined the two, because the use of the dishwasher would cause an unpleasant splurge of black sludge in the sink of the apartment two floors down...
• Baking in the summers. Fortunately, Amsterdam has a very moderate climate with only a handful of days out of the year where the temperature climbs higher than 30 Celcius (85 Farenheit), but when those days would come, and when they would happen to fall on a Sunday, we would bake in the Zolder...
• Pigeons cooing. On the end of the Zolder furthest from the Coat Room, it always felt like you were right in the middle of a pigeon colony; the sounds were amusing at first but increasingly annoying the longer you sat there...
• Pots and pans scattered throughout the Zolder to catch the water that dripped through the ceiling. This was a testament to less-than-vigilent landlords; we tried to get the owners to invest in some new roofing for over four years -- without any success. Instead, we tried strategically-placed pots and pans behind couches and drum-sets; even so, we ended up with some pretty ugly water damage...
• Frustrated staff members. Obviously, the demands for maintenance and marketing our rental units had to be met by someone -- and this ended up being certain members of our staff team (especially Lee and Patricia, in the early years). I'm sure they considered quitting their jobs on more than one occasion because of the stresses associated with the building. To be honest, the thought crossed my own mind a couple of times as well...
• Frustrated tenants. Part of the stress for Lee and Patricia came from the stress of tenants who had some random appliance stop working or such. Oh, how nice it will be to be finished with sub-leasing...
• Frustrated neighbors. We learned to get along with our neighbors pretty well, but we always had issues with bicycle parking and noise (especially on hot days, when we'd try to keep the windows open). The cops were called on us a couple of times, and we had to pay out an insurance claim for some dents on a car (which may have been caused by the bicycles of people from our church). But it will be good to leave with our good name as neighbors more or less intact...
• Requests for lodging from everybody and their brother. Did I mention that it will be nice to be finished with sub-leasing? What were we thinking in trying to establish an apartment rental business at the same time as a church!?!?
• Financial crises. Of course, this is the main reason that we're finally succeeding in loosing ourselves from the chains of the Zolder. More than once, it seemed we were down to our last euro -- only to see God come through for us again and again! Still, it only seems like good stewardship to move on to a situation that should be more financially viable for the long-term...

Ah, yes... it's funny to realize how easily and how quickly I can come up with such a list! I'm sure there are many other things like this (which are only amusing to enumerate because of the long list of counterweighted benefits that we've enjoyed throughout the last four years)... So in what ways will you secretly rejoice when we're finally departed from the ministry facilities on the Leidsekade?