Home Improvement Saturdays

One of the things that drives me crazy about Europe is their lack of screens on windows. For all of the differences between Europe and America, most I can sum up as a different way of achieving a same (or similar) end result. But I cannot for the life of me find the benefit of not having screens on windows…especially in a country where the temps rise with the season and air conditioning is not the norm.

But the flies and mosquitos…bleh. Italian mosquitos love me. American ones usually leave me alone for the most part, but after last summer in Italy, when my legs looked like they had hives one morning, I became the Off! poster girl.

So now that the weather is warming up, we decided it was time to figure out a way to make some screens for our windows. We’ve done a lot of MacGyver-ing in our time in Europe— make-shift laundry lines, adding a shower to a bath…we’ve been creative. We ended up finding some netting with sticky-sided velcro (the rough side) and we spent all of Saturday doing a little home improvement. We lined all of the window frames with strips of the velco and then measured/trimmed/hung all the netting. It stays up pretty well and now I can have the window open in the kitchen without letting the flies in, so that’s a minor victory. But more importantly, there’s fresh air abound.

Our apartment is officially summer-ready.