Building a MESSROOM

Hello everyone,

Before sharing few words about what we are currently doing, I need to say few words about me, because I haven’t written anything for the last 2 months.

My name is Hristo Atanasov. Already 60 years old man. 10 days ago I was announced for a Man of The Year in Bulgaria for 2007. So far, so good. Seems like the government recognized my activities as something noble. I’m not really sure.

24 years ago it was only me, my family and my business. In 2017, it’s me, my BIG family and still my business. I’ve raised two sons, lost my wife few years ago, and currently my family consist of 22 people – they are mainly individuals who were kicked out of the system and orphans who didn’t have where to go after they had to leave their orphanages.

It was 1993 and I was just launching my recycling business. My first employee was a boy who didn’t have where to go at the end of his first working day. The next employee was another boy with the same story.

Few years later we were already 36 people. I had to organize their working and living conditions, provide food and last but not least – teach them how to survive in this tough world.

If you don’t have any experience dealing with orphans in Bulgaria, I’ll only share that it’s not easy to deal with an orphan that has spent his first 18 years of his conscious life in a place without parents, relatives and friends. Yes, in Bulgaria the government and probably the society isn’t supporting these institutions and kids are handicapped from an early age.

In 2006, we had the chance to move to a bigger house. The local municipality gave us an old veterinary clinic and we’ve moved there. We had enough work and I decided to take loan to renovate the building.

During all these years, I had a dream, or call it a special mission. I knew that I have to build tiny houses for my family members and give them a chance to continue life as grown up, independent people. People being able to take care of their own families. Role models for the local society.

As you might have already seen, some time ago, I’ve published the first post and there were some pictures of the raw materials for tiny houses we currently have. Time is running and we still couldn’t initiate building, but this can’t make us give up so easily..We know that nothing happens without a reason and we’ll be patient.

In the meantime we’ve started building an extension to one of the assisting buildings in our backyard and our aim is to turn the extension into a MESSROOM

For the roof of the new add-on we’ll be using metal sheets taken from another building at Veliko Tarnovo. We'll fill the space below the metal sheets with mineral wool - this is a great filler that usually holds the warm temperature in the cold winter nights pretty well.

As you can see on the images, we’ve welded the basis and will soon cover it with the metal sheets. It could become a nice summer kitchen to spend the hot summer nights around the table with all the boys.