Henny and her partner Karel Voogd enter their house under construction. There are some shelves here and there, but otherwise it is still completely bald and empty. “Tadaa, so, that’s a thing to get in here,” says Henny with a smile. Henny has been completely blind since she was twenty. Yet she walks in with confidence, based on her partner Karel. “I tried to make it cozy, but also very transparent and airy,” she says.
But what is cozy if you can’t see? “For me that is not a ballroom as a living room,” she explains. “I like smaller spaces. And believe it or not, you feel at the air or a space is pleasant. A restaurant, a town hall, you know immediately when you step in, the atmosphere tells enough.”
Henny sees nothing, but in her head the house is already completely furnished. Every cupboard, every wall, the light, she came up with it in detail.
“I make a kind of map in mind,” she says. “I know how large kitchen cupboards are, how wide a room must be to feel comfortable. Then I draw it on my Braille device and the dots form the walls. Karel then draws it with pen so that he and the contractor can see it.”
Outside, in the garden, it is a different story. “It stood here male with male with weeds,” says Henny, going through the tall grass with her hands. She climbs in a lot of plant remains to remove some. “I’m going back to work, because there is still plenty to do.”
Feeling a difference between a desired plant and weeds is not that difficult for Henny at the moment. “Everything is weed,” she laughs. “But if you install your garden yourself, you know exactly what you have planted and where. That is all in my head, so then a difference between weeds and a plant is easy to recognize.”
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