I’m still low-key amazed by how much better I sleep without a snoring bed partner. Since the beginning of the year, I am naturally waking up earlier and earlier without any effort. A decision, yes: when I wake up around 6 in the morning, I could decide to laze around and doze for another while, but I decide not to. But not an effort. I wake up alert and rested.

Initially I had the alarm set for 7 so I could wake Adrian for school. Then I started waking up before the alarm. Now I have it set for 6:30, just for peace of mind so there’s no risk of oversleeping, but I’m almost always up earlier than that.

I can be packed and dressed and ready to leave for work shortly after 7. And that’s after also having emptied the dishwasher, folded the laundry and watered the plants.

Or I can have a lazy morning and read the newspaper and scroll reddit and still be ready to start my day in the home office at 7.

The snore-free bedroom may not explain all of it, but it certainly does feel like my divorce has given me an extra hour and a half of time every day. That’s enough to fully compensate for the free time I “lost” by switching to working full time instead of 80%. Not bad.

I need two clothes rails for my IKEA PAX wardrobes. They’ve been general storage closets for many years, but now I want to get rid of the large free-standing wardrobe in the middle of my bedroom and move all my clothes into the built-in wardrobes.

Choose a standard product from IKEA and you’ll have no trouble getting spare parts and replacements later, right? PAX wardrobes have existed for decades and they’re still there. But for some reason IKEA decided to abandon the standard 60 cm width at some point and left me somewhat stranded after all.

At least the fixtures and fittings and the holes for them are all still the same. I bought two clothes rails meant for the 75 cm wardrobe, and hopefully I can adapt them to the narrower width. Sawing off the rail is not too tricky, just tedious and noisy, but then there’s a small hole on one side of the rail that needs to fit a pin in the fastening mechanism, and that might be more challenging. I’m not there yet, though – first I need to borrow a drill somewhere.

I grew up with no particular skills in the DIY department. Wood shop and metalworking was for boys only, in 1980s Estonia. Girls got sewing, knitting and cooking classes instead. I can assemble furniture and re-upholster chairs, and maybe hack together some simple bookends or tool storage. But I don’t really know what I’m doing.

What’s the difference between all the wood saws in my basement? How do I make sure the holes I drill are straight? How do I get precision in my cuts and angles? Should I screw or glue? What kind of file do I want for this? Can I use this screw in this type of wall?

It’s been easy to leave most of the DIY work to Eric all these years – but it feels good to be forced out of my comfort zone now.

First thing in the morning: IKEA, to start looking for a new bed, and to buy clothes rails for my built-in closets. Visiting IKEA on a Saturday can be a nightmare, but not if you’re there right when they open. Plenty of space in the parking lot, and no crowds inside, either. By the time I was ready to leave, the situation in the parking lot was rather different, with cars hunting for free spots.

Next up: a trip to the city to buy embroidery yarn, which was also this season’s inaugural bicycle trip. My 30-day travel card ran out yesterday, and today was a bright, sunny day, which seemed like a clear sign that it was time to dust off the bike, pump up the tires, and start pedalling.

The sun is warm, but the air isn’t. And at this time of the year the sun still doesn’t reach very high in the sky. Even at two o’clock in the afternoon, long sections of the cycle lanes from here to the city are in full shade from the houses that line them.

In the evening: party. Eric, Ingrid and Adrian had a housewarming party at their new apartment. They’ve got all the essential furniture in place and have settled in. The living room sofa is large enough to fit Adrian’s entire band of friends at the same time!

And then later in the evening, Melodifestivalen with Ingrid, while Adrian was watching it with his friends at the apartment – we preferred a quieter evening. Much of the music is pretty boring – artists trying to repeat their wins by replicating previous hits – but the winning song, a catchy and humorous Swedish-Finnish song about saunas, was actually fun.

Exhaustion and bedtime after that.

When Eric moved out, we split our shared property evenly in value, but unevenly in kind. I got most of the things, he got most of the money. I believe we both wanted it this way.

Now I have the mismatched drinking glasses, the chipped bowls, the incomplete sets of crockery, while he has brand new everything.

That’s the way I like it. Had I ended up in the opposite situation, I could probably have found my way to accepting it, found a way to make myself see the positive in it, but it would have hurt. When we agreed to divorce, one of his first comments was “we’ll need to sell the house” while my first thought was “what do I need to do to keep the house”. Was keeping the house an economically sound decision? The jury is still out on that, but I need to at least try.

I get attached to things. I mend things that, from a utilitarian point of view, are in no way worth the effort, like old towels and shopping bags. The mere fact that I have owned something and used it for years gives it an inherent value of its own. I feel a responsibility to my things – to value them, to take care of them. To hold on to them.

Continuing on my purge journey, I am most of the way through our two filing cabinets.

The label on that folder says “1 year of bills” which indicates the original intent, but not the current reality. Firstly, it has multiplied from one folder into three – whenever one filled up, a new one just got added behind it. It has bills going back to when we still lived in London. Other folders have even more ancient content, such as phone contracts from 2001, and Eric’s rental agreements from before we even met. Thirty-year-old paperwork!

Eric was more fond than me of keeping paper copies of things. The utilities and services I had signed up for, I paid by e-invoice or automatic payment; the ones he signed up for, we got paper bills for – and they all ended up in the folders. But in the end, when push came to shove as he moved out, very little of it was important enough to bring with him.

Now the vast majority of all of it is going out. I threw out two large paper bags full of old papers today – around 20 kg and thousands of pages.

With the archives much reduced in volume, I can fit what’s left into one of the filing cabinets and get rid of the other one. That cabinet has been tucked away in one of the built-in wardrobes, which will then have room for my clothes instead, so I can sell or give away the free-standing wardrobe in the bedroom, which will in turn let me rearrange the rest of the furniture and figure out what kind of new bed will fit the new space. It’s a whole chain.

I scored a Skeppshult pot!

Our old cast iron pot was a gift from Eric’s sister, so it went with him when he moved out. We had it for so many years that I’ve actually forgotten what the occasion was for the gift. Was it for our wedding? Or even earlier, when we moved in together?

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for a new one for a while, because I miss it all the time. Or rather, not a new one – they’re so expensive that I decided I’d rather wait for a used pot to turn up than just order one.

I was just getting to the point where I was considering other, cheaper brands, or maybe buying an enamelled one, or maybe actually buying a brand new one after all… and then two 4-litre Skeppshult pots turned up independently on Tradera within days of each other, and I got one of them at a total steal. And it even had the lid in perfect condition, which isn’t always the case. The pot itself can be restored if it hasn’t been properly cared for, but there’s nothing you can do for a chipped glass lid.

One unalloyed benefit of the divorce for me is improved sleep quality. I literally haven’t slept this well in decades.

Eric snores. Has snored for years, and not done anything about it. I on the other hand have been a light sleeper since Ingrid was born – the gentle click of the bedroom door handle used to be enough to wake me when the kids were toddlers. Probably still is. Instinctually I know that I am needed, so I wake up.

I used to bulk buy earplugs to try and deal with the snoring. A little bowl for my earplugs was a permanent fixture on the bedside shelf, next to a lamp and an alarm clock. It worked so-so. Inevitably my ears were quite close to the source of the noise. I just got used to the fact that it could take me over an hour to fall into proper sleep.

No more! I go to bed, and I fall asleep. I wake up in the morning, and I am well rested despite spending fewer hours in bed than ever.

For a few years, until recently, I didn’t use an alarm – I just woke naturally some time between 7 and 8. Early enough to get to work at a reasonable time. Now I have an alarm set for 7:00 every morning. On weekdays I need to get up to wake Adrian, but I have the alarm on weekends, too. It works well for me to get up at the same time every day. (He is of course absolutely able to get up on his own, but school mornings are dreary enough without having to go through them all alone, so I get up to keep him company.) Ingrid’s hours vary, with work and school, so she manages her own wakings.

It didn’t take long for Nysse to figure out what the morning alarm means. Breakfast!

I feel guilty for leaving him alone as long and as often as I do these days, so I keep the bedroom door ajar for him in case he wants company at night. Sometimes he does, and he comes and sleeps next to me or on my legs. That also means that he has access to me in the morning. He used to come and bother me about breakfast – mrouwing in my ear and nosing at my face – at whatever hour he woke, but now he knows that it’s pointless. The moment the alarm goes off, though, he’s in there.

On the one hand, during the weeks when the kids are with Eric, I have more free time than ever. I could go out to concerts or jazz clubs or all sorts of places.

On the other hand, for those weeks I am the only person taking care of Nysse. If I’m gone from early morning to late night, he’s going to be alone and hungry and cold. (I’ve tried waiting around in the mornings to see if he’ll come in again after I let him out after his breakfast, but he doesn’t.) So I feel less guilty if I book an evening activity for when Ingrid and Adrian are staying with me, even though I am then leaving them alone. Poor Nysse got the short end of the stick in the divorce.

Eric finalized his move on Friday. I have the house to myself until Sunday afternoon/evening, when the kids will come for their week here.

The quiet feels particularly calming after the stress of last week. Like breathing out, and putting down a heavy weight. A lightness.

I don’t think I’ve quite settled into this new reality yet. It feels temporary.

My to-do list is massive. There are things to buy replacements for, closets and shelves and drawers to sort through, decisions to make. Good thing I have more time and more energy than in a long time.

Eric and I had two single beds put together, because we preferred mattresses with different firmness, with a double-width mattress topper on top. Now we detached them from each other and took one each.

It only took me one night to discover that a single bed feels much narrower than half of a double bed. I have to take care all the time to not lose the blanket over the edge of the bed. (I feel like there’s some kind of metaphor in there, for the end of a relationship.)

My plan was to make do with a narrow bed for a few months, until I have time to figure out how I want to furnish my bedroom in the longer term. Get a feel for the space, consider what else I might want in here.

That’s a bit of a chain of projects, though: before I invest in a new bed frame, I want to see the rest of the room as it will be. That means getting rid of the large double wardrobe in the middle of the room. For that to happen, I need to move my clothes into one or more of the built-in closets on the other side of the room. And that in turn requires me to sort through the stuff that is currently there, so I can make space.

I’m reconsidering that plan, though, because this is not very comfortable.

Eric is moving over his stuff to his new apartment, and odd gaps are appearing in the furnishings here. (The half-empty bookshelves looked particularly sad, until we moved the empty shelves as well, and consolidated what was left into a smaller space.) Now it was time for the houseplants. Many of them were more his “babies” than mine, so it made sense for him to take them with him. And overall he’s leaving so much more than he’s taking, so anything he is even remotely interested in, I’m happy to let him have.

(I know I have photos of what this space usually look like, but no idea how to find them.)

I took a trip to IKEA for some completely unrelated things, but realized that they have a decent houseplant department, and for the usual great IKEA prices. Nothing fancy, but that’s exactly what I wanted.