We have moved in

Ok. So we have now moved in! But I do not have any pictures for you yet. We have taken loads of pictures, but I do not have them here at work. Also it is quite messy still with boxes of stuff everywhere.

So, sorry for not posting in a long while. But the house is still not hooked up to internet, cable-TV or even telephone, which makes posting to the blog on non-work hours difficult. We are working to get us hooked up to Landskrona's fiber city network (supposedly the best city network in Sweden 2009, according to a yearly survey by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise).

However it will be weeks before this is done, because we were late deciding what sort of connection to get - plain old copper from the (formerly governmental) telephone company, or red hot fiber from the city network, for around the same price.

Fiber would give us the opportunity to get really fast broadband (100Mbit for the same price as 2Mbit from our former broadband provider!), but also having to use IP-telephony, which we have had the opportunity to do a long time from our former provider (for free even). But we were not interested then, because we felt that it was way less reliable than standard telephony. I hope this has improved the last few years.

My God, it’s full of stairs!

OK, Bonus points for catching the movie reference, but I wanted to tell you that the stairs have been installed! And we all thought they look great! The pictures are taken through the windows, because no one was there to let us in, but still, we could not resist showing them to you.

On a side note, the wood burning stove has been installed as well as you can see on the far wall. More pictures of that later, I suppose.

This, admittedly horrible, photomontage is trying to piece together two not too great pictures showing both the railings on the upper floor, and most of the stairs, seen from the window above the landing.

The stairs was one part of the house where we knew very little what the end result would look like. Basically we knew the layout with two flights of stairs with a landing in the middle, and had seen pictures of the railing, but no more.

Given our previous experiences we would not have been very surprised if the landing was not at all nicely aligned with middle of the two windows, above and below the landing.

But now that we’ve finally seen how everything about the stairs turned out, we are quite satisfied! Of course, we still haven't had a chance to actually try it out yet, perhaps it’ll feel awkward, too narrow or too steep?

Nah, it’ll be great, except perhaps when trying to get the furniture upstairs through the 180 degree turn :-)

Doors and more doors, indoors

Now all doors are in place, more or less. They are a few variations of the same basic model. I’ll show you.

This, for example is one of two sliding doors. This one leads to the study, and the other one sits between the kitchen and the laundry room.

And this one, with a round opaque window, sits between our bedroom and our bathroom.

Here in this picture of the hall, we can see two different doors at the same time. One regular door, leading to the clothes cabinet , and one (leading to the guest bathroom) with another opaque window, this one having a metal frame with large bolts.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get a good close up of the metal frame, so you’ll have to take my word that it looks kind of rugged and cool.

If you look closely you’ll see gaps between the doors, and the wall. This is because the door linings have not been put in place yet.

The door leading to the kids’ bathroom upstairs has no less than three round windows. So in general, you can count on round windows leading you to a bathroom.

But, please, there’s exceptions to the rule – so don’t try anything funny outside the round window in the living room.

The kids’ rooms, and our bedroom, also have regular doors without any additional decorations.

The Kitchen being installed

Today we managed to visit when the kitchen was being assembled and installed and took some pictures. The large open cabinet space in the center will later house the fridge and the freezer.

The cabinet to the left of that will have frosted glass doors, with interior spotlights. The cabinets above the windows will have doors that fold open upwards, with glass windows. The kitchen sink will be installed in front of the windows.

(As you can see, I’ve blurred Dan the Builder & Son, only because I think it’s unfair to publish pictures of other people online without asking permissions first. They didn’t ask to be on these pictures.)

The cube in the middle is the kitchen isle, where we have installed an electric outlet, but no water or anything else. It’s storage space, and somewhere to work when preparing meals, and is also designed to have room for two to be able to sit down for breakfast along one side (facing the windows). The other sides of the isle won’t have enough leg room, and will be less useful to sit by.

The open spaces below will house a microwave and a oven. I’ve realized that I have no clue if the microwave we’ve ordered is the kind that beeps a lot. Where I’m currently contracting there are two different microwaves; one older with a “wind up” timer, that simply makes a “pling” when done, and another newfangled digital one that beeps annoyingly for every single press on its many buttons, so it beeps at least four, five times when setting it up, and again when it’s finished. So the newer one manages to be more annoying, complicated and time consuming all at the same time.

Let’s hope our new one is not the annoying kind.

The dishwasher will be in the empty cupboard area right behind the kitchen isle. Fridge, freezer, dishwasher, oven and microwave will all be shining black, by the way. We decided we were really tired of all white machines. I’m not sure about the English term, but in Swedish it’s so ingrained they are supposed to be white that they are even collectively known as “whiteware”.

Regarding the splash of red color above, I have no idea why the painters put it there, really. It’s the color for our clothes cabinet. I can only assume they for some reason tried it somewhere where it would get tiled over later. The stove will be placed between the red color and the oven.

In this case the kitchen will be tiled with light gray glass mosaic, placed where the white paint does not cover, so approximately from the windows to the oven, halfway up the wall.

Since the mosaic is translucent, I assume they will paint some basic white primer wherever the mosaic will go.

Caution, Wet Paint

Now, most of the painting in the house is finished. Most of it is white, but not quite (!) since there’s a very slight note of grey in it.

The rest of the house is mostly white as well, with the exception of the bathrooms (of which you’ve seen one), the kitchen (oak/gray/black), a single wall in our bedroom (light blue) and our entire clothes cabinet (dark red), all of which I’m sure we will be showing you in some later posts.

Not all of it is finished. Especially not the kitchen, which have not yet even begun to arrive. Only the ceramic floors are done, the wooden floors for the rest of the house have arrived, but is still in boxes until all of the painting is done.

The living room area

Here are a few pictures of the living/dining room area. The round window still looks great. But it will be a challenge to put anything decorative in the window. Perhaps something hanging?

The beams will be painted in an oak finish (not yet done in this picture) matching the rest of the woodwork in the house.

Still no stairway. I’m really curious on how that will look when installed.

Wanna go Upstairs?

Bastian fearlessly climbed the ladder to check out his room. I guess it’s plain which one is his, and which one belongs to Beatrice?

And, yes, since you asked, we actually do try to encourage gender equality/neutrality, but it (obviously) takes other forms than forcing the kids to have yellow and green rooms. Their current room (which they share) is incidentally painted purple. But that was done when they were much too young to argue :-)

Storage space

I still haven't had a chance to see what became of the attic. I wonder how much usable space there is left? When moving in, we will be in sore need of storage space, since we put off building a garage for now.

Most likely we need to quickly build at least a garden shed for the stuff that we don’t want to keep in the house, such as the lawnmower :-).

This little piggy went to market

Anyone in the market for an apartment?

http://www.hemnet.se/beskrivning/hemnet/430429

It looks fairly attractive, if I may say so. And I have it from reliable sources that it is currently owned by a little old lady who only uses it on Sundays anyway, so it’s hardly even been lived in. And so incredibly cheap. (The apartment, not the lady).

I foresee the huddled masses gaping in awe at the public display, Sunday the 24th of May, fighting to get inside.

The Guest Toilet

So, as we said in an earlier post, the house is being tiled, floored and painted, and have been for two weeks. This is a few pictures of the guest toilet (minus the toilet and sink).

We have dark grey ceramic floor tiles, with dark mortar instead of white, making the grooves between tiles less visible. We put the same kind of tile in the laundry room as well.

In the entrance hall and kitchen we have the same kind of tile, only with larger sized tiles.

I hope you appreciate the flower tiles we put in among the white ones. (You, after all, will be the ones utilizing this room, won’t you?). Here is a closer look at one of them.

If you look closely at the area where the light is reflected, you might be able to see that the white tiles aren’t entirely plain, they have a subtle floral pattern imprinted. I’ve tweaked the coloring of the image a bit to make it more visible.

We also put a column of red mosaic where the sink will be.

What kind of mirror and/or light we will put above the to-be-installed sink is one of the few details we haven’t decided on yet.

The Front Door

Finally the front door have been installed. Initially the wrong type of door was delivered, but now we’ve got the correct one!

The sidelight does let in a lot of light, which is nice. The less electrical lighting the better…

The wood details are nice, too.

A lot of work has also been done with painting, flooring, and tiling the house, but that’s for another post.

This weekend our daughter Beatrice 6,5 years had a performance with her dance group. She's the kitty with the white scarf in the back to the right!

Today I visited our house and got a nice picture of our "window balcony".

I also had the curage to go upstairs and look at the view. I realised that when we open this window our cats will be able to enter the roof effortlessly, and as we had a small escapee the other day, through an upstairs window, this is going to worry me alot .

A next door neighbour came back with our cat and asked if we were missing something...

We are sooooo grateful that they found her, we didn't even have a clue that she had run away!

Dan the builder is busy doing the finishing touches so the painters will be able to start their work next week.

I told the painters today what colours we wanted, mostly orange and bright purple.

Just kidding!

We are going egg shell white on most walls for a start and then we will brighten it up with curtains and pillows and perhaps a quilt where it will look good.

I wandered around downstairs a bit as well and it really feels good, it feels that we will enjoy living in this house!

A lot of planning hopefully ends up in a nice house.

Can't wait until it is time to move in!

Wiring up the house

The last two weeks the electrician has been busy wiring up the house. So there’s now a lot of conduit (soft plastic tubes) being run, crisscrossing the entire house. It looks more chaotic than ever.

One side of each wall has already been drywalled, but the other is open for easy access, including most of the ceilings. When everything has been wired up correctly, everything will then be drywalled (expected this week or the next).

Of course, most of the wiring it has to end up somewhere near the wiring cabinet, which looks awfully messy right now. But I’ve seen (in another house) how neat and tidy the cabinet looks like when done, so I’m not worried.

In some central locations we need a lot of light-switches. These four is for controlling the kitchen and hallway. And there’s three more boxes on the other side of the entrance to the kitchen.

Here we can see that we are going to have outlets installed near the outer beams in the living room. The roof-frames prevents us from placing them dead center above each beam. We are planning to have dimmable spotlights shining upwards on the ceiling high above the living room, creating a sky-effect of sorts. Or so I hope.

The hole near the middle beam is for the exterior lights, I think, and will probably be more or less invisible from the inside.

The next picture shows the second floor ceiling being wired. Some of the conduit is for the upstairs TV-outlet; there is a "TV-network” being run from each TV-location terminating in the attic, so we have the possibility of distributing a satellite TV-signal from the attic, for example.

One can see see some of the cabling going up to the attic through the insulation (near the guy’s elbow).

This also includes a parallel run of empty conduit. Bert from Sesame Street would ask us why on earth anyone would want empty conduit, and Ernie might say it would be great for when it starts to rain candy instead of water... or was that an empty box?

In reality it’s for the possibility of installing, say, a small data network, if we feel the need later.

However, we expect to mainly use a wireless network. We use one at home today, which works great. It would’ve been quite expensive to fully network the house, and since we could get really fancy with wireless equipment without coming close to that sum, we cut that out (leaving only the empty conduit as a backup).

All rooms have walls

For the first time in weeks we visited the house yesterday afternoon, and took some pictures.

We have been busy with the children being ill and home from school, and at the same time deciding a million details for the house, such as electricity (number and placement of outlets, switches, dimmers, spotlights, indoor and outdoor lamps etc.), plumbing (placement of the upstairs radiators, type of faucets etc.), tiling for bathrooms and kitchen, finalizing the layout and design of the kitchen (number and placement of drawers and cabinets) and so on…

All rooms now have their walls. They are still open to one side, so the electrician can do his job next week, putting wires in the walls.

The most fun was seeing the rooms on the second floor. One can now walk around safely upstairs, because there is now a floor. Still no stairway though. It will be one of the last things installed, because it will stand on the parquet flooring, which is not to be installed for months.

This is the upstairs bathroom (to the left) and one of the bedrooms.

Here a few pictures turning left in the upstairs hall.

We decided on much larger windows facing south, and they really do let in a lot of light!

The only one who didn’t like these windows was Dan the Builder, but that was just because the window balcony were complicated to install, with lots of parts.

As a comparison, here are the normally sized windows on the opposite wall.

Here is a better view of the two side-by-side bedrooms.

This is how one of the three upstairs bedrooms look, they are all the same.

The Late Mr. Beam

Those of you who read this post know that there was a small problem with an unfortunate placement of a beam that obstructed the view out of the upper living room windows.

This situation has now been resolved, as you can see!

I’m not entirely sure what the did beside simply removing it, but we’re really happy they did. From the outside, sitting on top of my shoulders, this is what the upper windows now look.

And this is the one taking the picture above ;-)

Painting is virtually done

As you can see, not much remains to be done to the outside – the drain pipes, some exterior lights and the tile edges in the concave corner of the roof, and – of course - some paint.

Below I’ve played around in some painting software trying to show you the color we are planning to give our house, a very faint yellowish tint. I’m sure Angelica would have explained that better, I’m hopeless naming colors.

Let just hope it will be less spotted after the actual painting. :-)

No more scaffolding

Now all scaffolding have been removed, and as a result the house looks much more finished from the outside.

And this is from the small (dead end) street outside, across the rubble still left from the garage and the remaining tree trunks.

Have we mentioned that the buyers have now taken the remaining useful pieces of the garage, such as the door? There’s still a pile of old insulation though, that we’ll have to take to the dump some day.

The roof edge

This Friday, we also took some pictures of the edges of the roof which now has nice silver looking sheet metal covering the edges. The roof gutter and drainpipes will be the same material.

Here we can see that the tile edges in the concave corner of the roof looks quite jagged, and unaligned. Dan the Builder ensured us this will be fixed later when it’s not too cold and wet on the roof for the glue used.

Here Angelica inspects the roof balcony from the outside.

(A zillion bonus points for anyone spotting what she just noticed.)

The second floor

Today was the first time we actually was able to enter the second floor (by ladder)! This is the resulting picture. One can also see where the stairs will enter the second floor hall.

And this is the nice view out of the rightmost window (at least if one disregards the ugly red/yellow signs at the grocery store – lets hope they are bought by a grocery chain with subtler coloring!).

If it the weather had been clearer we would have seen Denmark, and the southernmost part of the island Ven, including the steep hills known as “Backafall” mentioned in the poem “Vid vakten” (1917) by poet Gabriel Jönsson who lived not far from here. The poem was set to music in the 50’s and became a very popular song; “Flicka från Backafall” from a movie based on the story of the poem (a sailor on a long voyage in the Caribbean longs for his girlfriend at home). I think I remember my mom singing it to me when I was little (*snivel*)

So, what was I saying again? Oh, yeah, one will be able to see Ven from here :-)

This Friday afternoon, it was sunny and we took this nice picture from the scaffolding outside, of the sun shining through the windows on the second floor. I think these large southeast-facing windows make all the difference!

More rooms

Tuesday morning, there were a few more walls up on the ground floor. This is the hall. The small room with the window is the guest toilet, and the slightly larger one to the right is a clothes closet.

Here “Mrs Pixel” is standing in the kitchen (a “remove-me–or-die”-edit :-)). One can also see the entrance to the hall and our bedroom. There will be a bedroom door near where the clothes closet wall ends.

Here we can see the wall separating the stairs from the office is also in place.

It will be very interesting when the stairs are put in place. It’s not easy visualizing from the blueprints how it will actually look. I hope it’s not too bulky.

The roof windows, and the wrong door

When visiting the house, it seemed that the doors was in place. We also saw that the roof windows on the side was in place.

This is what it looked like from the inside.

It was not until we came inside, that we noticed that the rest of the roof windows (including the window balcony) had also been installed.

We also saw that the front door was not in place, only the side light, and some provisory boarding in order to keep the weather out.

It turned out that the wrong door had been delivered, the one we got had the wrong kind of windows in it - a single round one, instead of three squarish ones. And it was supposedly a six week delivery time on the doors. We’ll have to wait and see.

The side door (no picture) is currently what they call a “construction door”; in order not to ruin the real door they put in a temporary one during the construction, so that it does not matter if it gets dented or scratched. I assume our construction door had been in use somewhere else, because it was quite scarred already.

So, this weekend we will not be able to get into the house, because it will be locked up, and we will actually not get the keys until the entire house is finished.

Of course, if we visit during working hours, and ask nicely, Dan the Builder might just let us in to take a few more pictures.