In Israel, building is a fact of life. Either you build yourself, learning to live and thrive in an apartment with a single bathroom (tip: get up before your teenage girls) and multiple trundle beds to trip over ... or you take the plunge and add a room or two or three to your existing home.
When our family had outgrown our apartment my husband and I decided to take what appeared to be the easy way out: instead of trying to learn how to thrive in such cramped conditions we would simply build an extra room.
Decision made I was ready to decide how this new room which was to be our bedroom would look. My husband was not. “We need to ask the neighbors ” he said on the evening that I had set aside to begin this project.
“Ask them what?” I said reaching for the pad of yellow paper and the pencil I had sharpened that morning in anticipation.
“Ask if they mind us building” my husband enlightened me.
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