the story of cha-lu-pa
Buying it blind / Stripped to the bone / The longest day / Happy ending / Short stories
sight unseen
The estate agent pulled the listing within two hours of publishing it – there was simply too much interest. By then, though, we had already jumped in the car and set off.
From behind the fence, my first call went to my wife – I asked her to agree that I would put down a binding reservation without ever seeing the inside. By then the agency had stopped answering the phone, so I sent a message straight away saying we were ready to sign.
Back in 2021 it was not easy to get hold of a cottage out in nature. Everyone was shut up at home, and even we IT people were seized by the urge to escape the monitor for the outdoors and some harder work.
The handover of the keys fell on my birthday.
Down to the bone
The cottage came with a commitment about how much we would repair and by when. It soon got tense.
The roofers told me: “We can come, but you have only a few weeks to get ready – after that we are off to work on a château in Slovakia.”
A crew of former prisoners and their foreman promised to help take the roof off. Suddenly the cottage stood in mountain spring weather under a thin tarpaulin. The wind tore at it and ripped the pegs out of the wall.
And then came a day that seemed to last 72 hours:
the day that lasted 72 hours
On the first day my brothers and I built formwork around the house until deep into the night. In the morning, after a short sleep, we went to work, and in the evening I came back to the site to finish the last ten metres of it. By morning everything was ready. The concrete crew arrived, hauled their heavy pump up the slope, looked at the shell of the cottage and muttered: “Shall we just pour it down the hillside instead?”
Everything was done except one gable, and I could finally drive to the emergency room to have a splinter taken out of my eye – it had been cutting into me all afternoon. I drove with one eye shut when my mum rang, which she had never once done about the building work. I told her I only had a piece of gable left to lay overnight, otherwise the lads would not close the concrete ring beam before the weekend. It could not wait – we were right on the deadline for the concrete to cure before the roofers arrived.
Then one brother called, and right after him the other – Mum had roused them both. I was still trying to talk the first one out of driving to me in the middle of the night; the second one wore me down. On my own I would have had no chance whatsoever. When they both arrived at ten in the evening, I was reeling with exhaustion. By five in the morning we were done and heading home. On the radio they were cheerfully welcoming the sleepy into a new day, while for me the longest day was just ending.
happy ending
Week after week we took at least a day off work so we could “do sport” on the site until deep into the night. In the end we stripped the original house back to bare walls, dug out the floors and turned over the whole garden.
Huge thanks go to many friends, and above all to my brother Fífa, my father-in-law Petr, and to God – I have never prayed as much in my life as when the roof was off and the site looked like a ruin from a war zone. And not only then: over four years so many moments piled up when a happy ending seemed unlikely. And yet it came.
Since the spring of 2025 the cottage has been open, and it is a joy to keep up this “renovation sport” so that week by week our guests have it just a little bit better 🙂
short stories
Of two devout IT guys
In Loučná everyone is called Richter – the haulier, the digger driver, the builder’s merchant. One day Mr Richter came to my rescue with an urgent delivery of materials and said: “I deliver to another IT bloke too. He bought a little château, and whenever he calls he says ‘just bring it round sometime’. He is in no hurry at all. Now and then he does up another room, but people are happy to hold weddings even in a ruined château, so he is fine. Mostly he is relaxed because he says he is devout and the Lord will look after him.”
And I said: “Well, I am devout too, BUT I HAVE DEADLINES!” 🙂 Ever since, I have been wondering whether the whole thing could not have been done without the rush. And I keep reciting Psalm 23 to myself, wondering how to actually live with the line “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall NOT want…”
About Josif
One day Josif asked me: “Maty, how many lorry-loads of sand did you have delivered?”
I said: “No idea, but a lot.”
And Josif showed me his small trowel and added: “Well, I threw every last bit of that sand onto the walls with this.”
Josif was a Ukrainian of retirement age. He had worked in Czechia for many years and spoke excellent Czech. He stayed in the cottage even when it was freezing everywhere, the floors across the whole ground floor were dug out, and only one upstairs room was heated. Besides all the plastering and a great deal else, he also rescued a terrifying deadline for preparing every opening for the windows. That deadline, too, magically landed on my birthday.
About a break-in
Once, about twelve children from a church in Litomyšl came to Loučná nad Desnou with two leaders, Fífa and Maty. That evening the two leaders told them they had failed to find accommodation for such a large group at the last minute – but that there was a hill in the village with two abandoned houses on it, and surely nobody would mind if we spent the night in one of them and left it in the morning exactly as we found it.
It was already dark when we split into two groups so that each could scout one of the houses. We were to radio the others if we found somewhere to sleep. One house had an open cellar with a collapsed vault, which looked veeery dangerous. The other had only boards under a tarpaulin instead of a roof, but the barn doors stood open and you could sleep inside. A ladder lay in the corner of the room, and three metres up there was a hole gaping in the wall. We decided to investigate. Everyone’s nerves were stretched to breaking point – I even had to whisper to the terrified youngest girl that she need not be afraid, because it was our cottage 🙂 Through the hole we reached the living quarters, full of beds, a working kitchen with a stove… Only then was it time to let everyone else in on the secret: it was our cottage, and they could pick their beds 🙂
Before the cottage opened officially to guests, we had perhaps five weekend stays here with the church kids. During one of them we rigged a temporary roof over the hole meant for the hot tub, piled snow on top of it, and with an old stove pushed the temperature inside about fifteen degrees above the temperature outside – and had dinner together in there.
Blood poisoning
I had a brilliant idea: we would dismantle our ageing kitchen at home, move it to the old flat at the cottage, and put a new one together back home.
It soon turned out that this grand manoeuvre would not go quite as smoothly as we had hoped. The whole flat was filled with two half-assembled kitchens, and moving between them was the usual line-up: me, my father-in-law Petr, and my brother Fífa.
Petr, I think, was recovering from knee surgery; Fífa had come down with some stomach bug, so after slipping away to be quietly sick he was suspiciously slower for the rest of the day. I could not bend my knee, because a nail had gone into it at the cottage a few days earlier and the whole thing was swelling and stiffening. Slightly unpleasant, too, was the fact that my temperature was starting to climb.
I do not know whether I looked the worst of that merry crew at that moment, but when Hanička got home from work and caught sight of me, she said “absolutely not” and drove me to A&E.
Hanička is convinced they gave me something for the pain straight away, because when she said goodbye to me in the hospital – me lying on a drip with blood poisoning – I was beaming like sunshine and kept saying I felt reeeally wonderful. To this day I think it was not the painkillers: it had simply dawned on me that I had dropped out of the marathon for a while, and that several days awaited me with nothing but a book, quiet, a bed and the care of the nurses. The sheer joy of rest spread through my veins along with the antibiotics. (Admittedly it had its downsides – such as when they scraped the pus out of my knee with a spoon – but otherwise it was one of the most peaceful holidays I have ever had.)
About the millionaire from Ukraine
One day Josif came to me in secret with a small coin, asking me to help him sell it – someone back in Ukraine had found it somewhere and it was supposedly worth a fortune. I searched the numismatic sites and it really was a rarity worth several million. Josif was already picturing himself buying the cottage next door, and I started writing to coin experts. I believe it was an associate professor from Charles University who was kind enough to send me the sad news that it was a forgery. A shame. A man as hard-working and honest as Josif deserved to become a millionaire in his old age. He always impressed Mr Richter, working away there so conscientiously and independently, with nobody watching over him.
The masonry work with me had to end eventually, and Josif moved on elsewhere. Six months later I heard that cancer had struck him down and the doctors were giving him his last months. But he pulled through, and apparently, between rounds of chemotherapy, he is still running around building sites in Olomouc to this day.
Contact
Loučná nad Desnou, Rejhotice 118, Czech Republic
Matyáš and Hana Hájek
info@cha-lu-pa.cz
721 641 358
