Freddie & Kandee | The Kids | Family Photo Album | Harris House

Harris House

The Harrises lived and worked for 18 years the Paris region.  Today the Harrises live in Kandern, Germany, which is located in the corner of Germany, Switzerland, and France.  That's why the region is called "dreilandereck," three country corner.

God has been so good to place us here in this region, so that the kids can go to this International Christian School and yet closer enough to France so we can stay involved in French ministry at several levels.  God has also been very good to place us here because, while having an ideal and far-reaching ministry impact, we can live in a small, beautiful country village.  Kandee and I are both from "small town USA" and this is like a dream come true, as far as living AND ministry conditions.

God is also do to have placed us in a house where our ministry of Hospitality can blossom as never before!!!  We praise God for this amazing opportunity.  It is a blessing to our entire family.

This section of our website will be a continuing story of God's goodness, with photos!

This is our house, viewed from the east end.  This house used to be a watermill, one of four watermills in Kandern.  The date of the construction of this watermill is 1357.  At the right you can see our two-car carport. (We don't presently have two cars and the black Mini Cooper in the fore ground is NOT our car.).  The garage with the wood door is also our garage.  We are using it presently for storage and for a work bench with our tools.

This is our bedroom now.  It used to be a small living room, but now that we have a big living room downstairs, we have transformed this room into our bedroom.  The wainscoting are the original hand carved panals from the 12th century.  The ceiling is sculptured plaster.  All the window openings in the house are arched.

This room is right across from our bedroom.  It serves as Kandee's sewing room and doubles as a guest bedroom.  See the beams.  There is no door.  Kandee made a curtain that can be drawn so that a guest sleeping in this room may have some privacy.  By the way, the dates on these photos are not accurate at all.

Sorry that these photos are a bit out of focus.  Let's just imagine that it was done on purpose to add a romantic, artistic flare.  This is the hallway looking toward our bedroom and the sewing room at the end of the hall.  You can see the exposed beams in the walls.  Beams like these are normally hidden under plaster.  In more recent years they were uncovered to add rustic beauty.  Each beam was cut to size for its placement in the structure.  Often they carved roman numeral-like markings into the beams to indicate where they belonged.  Slots were cut in the vertical beams so the horizontal beams could be fit into them.  Instead of nails, holes were drilled into the horizontal beams where the butt of the vertical beams had been inserted.  A round peg was hammered into the hole.  I think it worked better than nails.  These have lasted about 650 years, so, yeah, I say that the peg system was quite effective.

About midway down this hall, on the right, you will see an interesting wood door, about waist-high.  It has a couple shapes carved out for decoration. there is a stone frame around the door.  This was apparently some kind of fireplace, because we can see the chiminey in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.  Some have told us that it could have also been some sort of meat smoker.

We don't have any more interesting photos for this floor, which is the second floor of this four story home.  There are 3 other bedrooms on this floor and a bathroom and a room that used to be our kitchen, until we finish our kitchen downstairs.  While I'm at it, let me say that the third and fourth floor are actually more like attic space presently, unusuable except for storage.  Lord willing, we may rennovate these in the future.

This is the first room to your right as you come down the stairs.  We call it our library, sitting room or office (our home computers are here) and it also doubles as a guest bedroom.  Not in view, behind you to the left, is a window looking out the front of our house, an arched window well again, of course.  What you can see in front of you is an arched hole in the wall, which overlooks our "great room."  That was not there before.  Kandee got the idea one day, when I was off on a mission trip, and spontaneously had Remy and other BFA kids knock a hole in the wall!  You can't see it very well in the photo, but it actually turned out very pretty.  Another thing that you can't see, but that is interesting to know about, is hidden behind this wall with the book shelves.  There is a stone oven behind that wall that apparently openned up to this room at one time.  Since this house was a watermill/flour mill, we think that they must have also baked bread here and sold it at one time.

Coming down the stairs and to your left, you will see our new kitchen, new as of a year or so ago.  This was an ugly dark and dingy room before.  Where you see this rocking chair now was a wall making a short hallway into this room.  There was no electricity in this room and a not-so-pretty, rotted-out pine floor.  We wanted to open things up a bit, like typical Americans.  We took that short hallway out and banged out the upper segments of the inside walls, as you can see.  We put in floor heating, a layer of cement, then tiled the floors.  We had to bring electricity, water and natural gas into the room. 

Instead of all new kitchen cabinets, we bought old buffets and sideboards.  These are readily and economically available in some French second-hand stores.  Since most Europeans seem to prefer new furniture and, for them, 80-90 year old furniture is not antique, just old, ... the price of these buffets and sideboards were very interesting, about 50 euros a piece.

We have a balcony off the kitchen looking over our "great room."  Look off the balcony to the right you see our dining room.  With leaves in our table we can seat 10, if we need to.

This is the same dining room, right before a special meal.

Looking off our balcony to the left, we see our living room in the middle around a fireplace, and a sitting area around the piano, and the curved stairs leading to our back door.

In the middle part of our "great room" is a living room area, with a fireplace.  We had this fireplace built by a local fireplace builder.  All the rocks are original with our house, taken from the walls that we tore out.  The fireplace is actually an inserted (or built-in) iron Swedish Jotul furnace.

I am blowing out the candles on my birthday cake, on December 24.