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 :-).

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).

The Beams in the Living Room

We have known for a long time that we wanted a living room that was opened up to the second floor. Exactly how the opening was to be constructed was a different matter, and was not decided until much later.

The first design was that there should be no beams (using a special kind of roof truss), giving us several meters of free space up to the ceiling.

But after we got the initial construction drawings, it became obvious that this would look good from the living room, but not looking down from the second floor railing. The ceiling height there would be much too low!

So, we instead opted for wooden beams in the living room, which raised the living room ceiling up to the same height as the rest of the second floor ceiling, creating a better whole.

But we have been unsure on what the wooden beams would actually look like. So is it nice to finally be able to actually see all of this for real.

Here's two pictures that shows them in more detail.


The first one is looking into the living room, and you can see all four wooden beams. (The metal beams will be hidden later on.)





This is a close up to better see the structure and spacing of the beams.

I am not sure what the ceiling height will end up being in the living room, but more than 5 meters (16 feet) anyway, because each floor is 2,5 meters high.