A Bigger Makeover Project

A side benefit of working from home has been that I’ve made considerable progress with “Know Thy Neighbour”.

My nextdoor neighbours are a couple with a three-year-old. The first year or so after we shifted here, we barely got to see them. We were busy. They were busy. We travelled a lot. So did they.  Exchanges were thus limited to greeting each other when we occasionally met in the corridor, and watering each other’s plants, which we would shift from the balconies to the common corridor when going away for extended periods.

Working from home this last year has given me more time to get acquainted with my young neighbour. It started with exchanging a few dishes we had made. Then, her son came over a couple of times to play with our dog. We bonded further over coffee and as the year of working from home progressed, we learned that despite the difference in our age, we have quite a few common interests.

Since then, we have started a more or less regular routine of evening walks together. We also took driving lessons (see Celebrating Women’s Day with a New Skill) together. As we are both interested in potted plants, we eventually got around to discussing the kind of pots we wanted in the common corridor. And that leads me finally to the topic of this post — the makeover of the corridor.

Here’s a ‘Before’ picture of the corridor from last Diwali.

Thankfully, we had complementary, if not similar, ideas for the corridor. As you can see, the entrance to our houses are positioned in such a way that if one of us decides to strike out on her own, it would lead to a very unbalanced look.

The makeover involved getting ordering hooks and railing pots online, visits to the nursery for hanging pots and the railing plants, and then putting them all together.

Here are a few pics of the corridor after the makeover.

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Hope you like it.