We now have Internet access again, so I’ve posted all the queued-up things I’d written in the meantime, and dated them as I originally wrote them. Happy reading.

We have a relatively bare garden, with a large expanse of neglected mossy lawn, a few bushes (one jasmin, a row of lilacs, and several unidentified bushes) and several cherry trees. The cherry trees totally dominate the garden. There’s a large one at the back and another one at the front, and both are about as tall as the whole building. A third, smaller one has been added to the front side more recently.

In the photos we saw when we were buying the house, the trees were in bloom and looked quite stunning. Now the flowers have become cherries, and quite good ones. Smallish, tart rather than sweet, but with a rich taste. We’ve been sorting through the fallen ones and picking the ones we can reach from a step ladder, but many of the ripest ones, shiny and plump and almost black, remain tantalisingly out of reach.

Ingrid likes cherries, although she hasn’t quite figured out that the best ones are darkest. She takes whichever one is closest to her. She’s generally understood that one spits out the pits, but when she’s in a hurry she sometimes eats the pits, too. Other times, when I remind her to spit it out, she spits out half the cherry. More practice is in order, I think.

Birds like our cherries, too. When I go out into the garden I often scare off a pigeon or two who’ve been eating in the tree. (And then they leave large blue blobs of bird shit behind them.) We also have a lot of magpies around here, but they mostly fly around and make a lot of noise – I’m not sure if they eat any cherries. Blackbirds and sparrows are also frequent visitors, and some woodpeckers, too. One of our bedroom windows has a pigeon-shaped imprint since one of them hit it head on, and a woodpecker hit a veranda window from the inside (having flown in but then gotten confused about the way out).

The garden is home to lots of snails. They come out after rain and congregate on top of the root cellar. I wonder where they hide when it’s dry?

There is also at least one hedgehog in the neighbourhood, as I saw it potter along a hedgerow one afternoon, and deer. The deer are not the least bit shy, and one morning Eric saw one standing in the garden when he got up. They’re generally reviled by garden owners since they eat the leaves off all kinds of plants (including tulips and strawberries) and probably strip the bark off bushes in winter, but since we have nothing but grass, they’re welcome to stay here for now.

One day June became July, and almost instantly the office emptied as everyone went on vacation. Today we were 4 people in the office, out of the normal 15 or so. There are also noticeably fewer people on the train in the morning and the evening, and various restaurants in town have closed for the summer. In Sweden, apparently, the old industrial tradition of everyone taking vacation at the same time (in July) is still alive. I’d forgotten that things worked this way here.

We had a housewarming party yesterday. Best to do it straight after moving, we thought, so people will come with low expectations and won’t be shocked by bare rooms furnished mainly with moving boxes!

It was a great success in many ways. We had invited both friends and family, but also people from the neighbourhood: all houses that we can see from ours, and a few more. A lot of them came, and all turned out to be very nice people. (Perhaps the less nice ones decided not to come?) For some of our neighbours, this was the first time they met each other. We were quite pleased to have arranged this, and we’ll probably try to find a reason to repeat this next summer, or some other time of the year.

There are children in almost all houses in all four directions (we live on a corner), so Ingrid will have a lot of friends to play with. That’s not always been the case, we heard: there’s been a distinct generation shift in the area over the last decade or so, with older people moving out and young families moving in. A few are still holding out – a lovely couple in their 80s came by, and apparently there’s a lady in her 90s in one of the houses across the street (too old, unfortunately, to join us for the party).

We also got to hear some of the history of this house. We’d already met the previous owners, of course, and knew roughly what kind of people they were (not much into gardening, for one thing). They haven’t left much of a mark on the house or the garden. The owner before them was the author and instigator of the extension, built in 1970s. We now know that the guy had a taxi firm, and that his reason for building the extension was that he wanted to add a double garage to the house. But he couldn’t build just a sunken garage, so he was obliged to put something on top of it. Which explains the seeming lack of interest in the interior plan for that part of the house – it was an afterthought! For some reason, possibly economic, he also did much of the building work himself, which explains the somewhat cheap look and the uneven execution.

It’s a great house in a lovely garden, and yet there is so much here that needs fixing. It’s like the previous owners have only invested the bare minimum they had to – in both time and money – to keep it in an OK shape. It’s not run-down or dilapidated, and nothing is really broken… but they’ve done almost no work outside the house, and all work inside has been done as cheaply as possibly.

The stairs from the gate to the house are crumbling. I keep stumbling and I can barely get the pushchair down.

The lilacs and the jasminephiladelphus are totally overgrown. A maple tree has put its roots down in the middle of the jasminephiladelphus and had enough time to grow 3 metres tall, instead of being cut down straight away. And there are birches of various sizes (ranging from “small enough to pull up by the roots” to “as tall as the house”) growing up through the base of the fence.

There is a big tangle of nettles right next to the house.

The pillars supporting the veranda are too short so a few wooden plank ends have been wedged in between each pillar and the veranda floor above it.

The bathroom looks like something from a cheap youth hostel. If’s fully functional, and nothing is broken, but it’s also got stark white walls, an ugly gray-green plastic floor, a leaky shower head, a wonky curtain rail, a chipped sink, and fixtures with no style whatsoever.

The numerous wardrobes have almost no interior fittings. Either the previous owners made do with some sort of drawer trolleys, or they just piled their stuff in there, or they didn’t use the wardrobes at all.

Lots of work to do!

Ingrid is on the verge of giving up her daytime naps. It’s harder and harder to get her to sleep (most days the bicycle trailer is the only thing that works) and the naps happen later and later. And if she naps, she is alert and awake until late evening, some days well past 9 o’clock. On balance, the struggle of getting her to nap is now barely worth it. But if she doesn’t nap, she often gets overtired in the evening, and both our dinner and preparations for getting her to bed are interrupted by frequent temper explosions, with crying and flying cutlery.

We had looked forward to a few more years of naps at least (she’s not even two yet)… they give us a chance to catch our breath and to maybe get something done during the day. Now it’s non-stop activity from morning to evening. But on the other hand, if she doesn’t nap, she goes to bed around 7 in the evening, which leaves me 4 hours of free time, instead of 1 or 2.

We’ve only been in this house for a few days and already I feel at home here. The house feels familiar, comfortable, right. I guess that means we bought the right house.

At the same time I feel like I’m on vacation. I’ve never lived in a house before, and I associate houses (and especially gardens) with the long summers of my childhood, at my grandmother’s summer house. The noises in the neighbourhood – dogs barking, children playing, chainsaws roaring – also remind me of those times. I have this vague feeling that soon it will be autumn and I will have to go back to the city and back to school.

The comfortable feeling is partly because I am taking the move from a two-room apartment to a 4-room house in small steps, easing myself into this new place. We’re only occupying the ground floor now – the stairs to the first floor are blocked off because we don’t want Ingrid climbing them before we get a banister in place. And while I love the feeling of a garden around the house, I have been enjoying it from a slight distance: from the kitchen window or the veranda. Actually walking or sitting in the garden feels weird. It doesn’t feel like mine yet.

It took a bit longer for Ingrid to be comfortable with the move. She didn’t like the move itself at all: strange place, strange people, strange doings, and nobody was paying much attention to her. The disruption led to a few days of clinginess and a few nights of broken sleep. But I think she’s also more or less settled in here now. She calls the house “home” already, and comfortably finds her way around, even early in the morning when she wakes up and comes searching for me in the bathroom and the kitchen.