The very first daffodils in the garden are flowering, along with the last and largest of the crocuses.

Those are both large and bright and catch the eye amidst all the dead grass. But the flowering currants are prettier than either of them. The leaf buds have opened, and from each one a dark pink, downy cluster of flower buds emerges, alongside a barely-open new leaf, also edged in pink.

The witch hazel is flowering in beautiful pinkish-orange-red in front of the house. Apparently I bought a red variety. I love it, and I hope it thrives.

And yellow Eranthis is already dotting the gardens in the neighbourhood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in January before.

That neighbourhood cat that has made itself at home beneath our bird feeder has knocked it over repeatedly in his attempts to catch the birds. The whole stand itself is bent and some parts are just plain broken.

We’ve tried to make the ground beneath the feeder uncomfortable for it, and to to raise the feeder higher, and so on, but the cat hasn’t gotten the point. So we took a step back, considered our options, and then Eric constructed a new, hopefully cat-proof feeder stand.

The new stand is much more stable and should be really hard to knock over. At the same time it is super easy to disassemble and pack away for the summer. And cheaper and more environmentally friendly and more easy to dispose of than the old one, too. Just superior in all ways, basically.

It’s too easy to just go out and buy a solution to your problem. “I want to have a bird feeder in my garden. Therefore I should buy one.” And you can do it from your desk or your phone and it even comes delivered to a pick-up point near you so you barely have to leave the home to get it. If it had been harder, then we might have made one ourselves to begin with.

Autumn is not my favourite season, but I do love its colours. When I planned and planted the hedge, each bush’s autumn colours were a big part of my decision. There are spireas of several kinds with their interesting colour combinations (orange and purple!) and aronia bushes with brilliant red leaves and black berries. It looks colourful from afar, a bit scruffy when you get closer, and then stunning again when you get really close.

The cherry tree is apparently having one of its more colourful autumns this year. Photos can’t do it justice, but I keep trying anyway.

Actually we have three cherry trees. What “the cherry tree” refers to depends on the season. In the summer, it’s the one behind the house, with the sweet and juicy berries. (The others bear small, sour berries that we don’t pick or eat.) In the autumn, it’s the one in front of the house, with the fiery colours. The third tree is smaller and younger and less colourful. I even considered cutting it down because, honestly, how many cherry trees do you need in a garden? But I just couldn’t do it. Now I kind of think of it as a backup for the autumn tree, in case that one dies because of how many large branches and roots it lost when we had to dig up the water pipe.

When I mentally list the things that I like to do, gardening is one of them. And yet I’ve barely done anything in the garden this season. Just like I think of walking and hiking as one of my hobbies, and I’ve done almost no walking this past year. I don’t know where all my time and energy goes.

Today, in any case, I spent much of my free time in the garden. I cleared out a whole lot of weeds from the area I planted with bushes in June, and shovelled out all the soil from two of our planters with strawberries. Or rather, the planters that used to have strawberries but that have since been overrun with a particularly obnoxious weed that is impossible to get rid of because its stalks and roots near the surface are thread-thin and just break when you try to pull them out, leaving behind a well-buried rhizome that soon sends out new shoots. So I’m giving up on those two boxes and will start over with stronger geotextile, fresh soil and new plants.

Ingrid’s new room has a new sofa. The poor girl was forced to get up at 10 so we could pick up the rental trailer at 11 and then go buy the sofa from a lady in Duvbo shortly after that.

The sofa was an utter pain to get down and up narrow stairs, and some parts felt like they weren’t very strongly attached and might fall off when carrying the sofa, but there were no other parts to hold on to either. I was quite relieved when we got it in place with all parts still in place.

Ingrid reports that the sofa feels great to sit in and lie on.

We celebrated “peak mess” with cake. Now we can start moving all furniture into its proper place, and will no longer have to walk sideways to get through the living room.

The floor guy has done his thing and left, and finally the building works here are done.

In the living room we opted for soap treatment only, like we have in the other rooms downstairs. I love the smell and feel of soap treated pine floors! The floor is getting its initial treatment here, with Adrian wetting the boards and Eric scrubbing in the soap. (I did the mopping up afterwards, when I wasn’t taking photos.)

The kitchen floor is going to get so many spills of all kinds that it needs more protection, so we went for a the most matte varnish available. The end result looks and feels much more pleasant than I had expected: very matte, quite different from all other varnished floors I have seen before. If varnished floors can be this discreet, maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad to varnish the floors in the other rooms as well? It will be really interesting to see how this ages.

I feel like I’m living in a used furniture warehouse.

The house is a total mess, and I am heartily tired of it.

The kitchen floor is waiting to be finished, and we’ll give the living room floor a new finish at the same time. (It’s yellowed and scratched and scruffy, who knows how old the varnish is.) We’ll need to empty the kitchen and the living room for that. We’ve known that this is coming up “soon” for a while now, so some things that we packed away to make space back in May (such as most of Adrian’s things) are in boxes that are stacked in various places around the house. For three months now.

And all the rooms are swapping places – our bedroom moves, Ingrid moves, Adrian gets a room of his own – which means more boxes. And furniture and rolled-up carpets and paper bags of stuff, piled up here and there.

The floor guy has been on vacation so this has dragged on. But early next week the floor will finally get done and then we’ll have turned the corner and we can finally start putting things in order instead of making the mess worse.