I sawed off a large dead branch on the apple tree, that had been hanging on only with external support. Then another one. And a third one. And a few smaller ones.

The branch above, all hollow, is not one of those; it is actually green and growing still.

The tree is very old and not doing so well.

We’re barely in the middle of August and it feels like summer is over. Cloudy days and cool evenings. This is probably the last meal we’re going to have outside this season. Shouldn’t August be a summer month still?

I missed the cherry season this year. So busy with other things during my vacation that, by the time I looked at the cherry tree, the fruit were all bird-pecked, wasp-eaten, and falling off the branches.

A cloudy, almost-rainy Friday evening is the best time to visit a garden centre – absolutely no crowds and no queues.

I finished planting the new area this weekend. Bergenia at the far back; Hazelwort around the very base of the elder bush; Heuchera under the rest of it.

Many garden design sources suggest putting contrasting plants next to each other, but I chose to go with the complete opposite here. The dark leaves of the Heuchera match the elder, and I intentionally put them right under it. To me it feels like bits of the elder have fallen to the ground and taken root, or like a big red bush sheltering tiny red cousins under its wings.

Not that you can really see any detail here, with the glare of the evening sun.

Planted berry bushes in the new area, and started on the ground cover.

One redcurrant bush, one blackcurrant, and one gooseberry. I love all of these for eating and cooking, and it’s very rare to be able to buy them here. If you want any, you need to grow your own. I tried a gooseberry bush in a planter box, but as with everything else I tried growing in the boxes, it required eternal watering and mostly died the moment I stopped. This corner of the garden is in partial shade (not great for berry bushes) and there’s other things here competing for resources, but the soil here is good and shouldn’t dry out in the same way, so maybe this will work.

Underneath, it’s simple ground cover plants. Some Epimedium at the back, Waldsteinia towards the left, Geranium macrorrhizum in the middle. I’m not at all fond of the bare earth (or mulch-covered earth) look. These have all been successful in other parts of the garden, so the odds are good.

What hasn’t thrived at all is day lilies (Hemerocallis). I’ve put them in two places and they’ve been weedy little things, literally no larger than a small tuft of grass. There, at the top left, surrounded by the Waldsteinia. They’re supposed to be pretty hardy, but apparently not here. They’re going out as soon as I have time to buy a replacement.

It feels like I’ve spent half my vacation on this basement project. Today was, finally, the last of it.

I do now have a very nice and well-organised basement. I know what I have in all the boxes, and where everything is. Plenty of room to access everything.

I don’t think it’s ever been this clean, given that some of the junk I threw out had belonged to the previous owners of the house.

Today’s surprise: mice.

I had noticed before that a bag of sunflower seeds had been chewed up in one corner, but, not seeing any other danger signs, assumed that that was that. Maybe a mouse got in, ate some of it, and then left again.

As I was moving the boxes around and looking inside to see what’s what, I discovered that the mice had gotten into all sorts of places. Chewed things, made nests in boxes with clothes, built caches of sunflower seeds. I had to go through every single box to remove the sunflower seeds and mouse poop, and the flakes of paper and plastic and fabric that they’d used to build nests. Plus try to save what could be saved by washing and wiping off, and throw out that which was too badly chewed or too smelly.

This was totally not what I had planned for my vacation.

In two boxes, I was met by live mice when I opened the box. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or the mice.

Nysse, good boy that he is, went into instant hunting mode. He quickly caught at least two of the mice that were loose in the basement, and one that I managed to dump outside. Then he kept guard and patrolled the basement for the rest of the evening. I’ll be bringing him back here daily to keep at it.

I didn’t want to take a break at this stage. Better to clear out all their hiding places and food caches as soon as possible, so that I don’t miss anything. I worked until close to midnight.

I got my shelves built yesterday. Nice, today I can screw them in place and then tidy up the rest of the basement and be done with it!

Nope. Just these shelves took all day.

What I didn’t take into account:

The time it took to empty the shelves of, among other things, nearly one hundred jars of jam, and move it all out of the way. And then move it back again afterwards.

The time it took to buy more timber so that I could adjust the shelves because, while I had measures the length and the width very carefully, I had not taken into account the fact that screw holes can’t be drilled just anywhere.

The time it took to drive to the DIY shop yet again because it turned out that I did not own a wrench. What kind of household doesn’t have a wrench? This one, until now.

The time it took to drive to IKEA to buy cross braces for the shelves. Their apparent stability until now has been a mirage; the moment I started moving them around, they wobbled and wanted to collapse on the diagonal. Seriously, so much driving today.

How hard it is to move heavy shelving units with just one person.

How awkward it is to assemble a shelving unit in a room where it just barely fits. I’m glad it fit at all, I’m not sure what I would have done otherwise.

Anyway, it’s all in place now. The shelves are fit for purpose, sturdy and stable. The doorway is clear. The jam jars are sorted by content, and so are the paint buckets.

Back to the basement. The focus today is on making more shelves for the shelving units in the inner room in the basement.

I’ve been told that the basement as a whole was built to house a previous owner’s taxi business. The main area of the basement was used as a garage, and this inner room was probably the only actual storage space. We haven’t had a car in here for years; it’s all storage now. This inner room is particularly cramped, and it’s hard to even get things in and out because of how stuff is partially blocking the doorway. The shelves look like they’ve been thrown up without any long-term plan, and the space is very inefficiently used.

Two of the shelving units look identical to the IKEA Hejne series, which we also have many metres of in the main area. But… either IKEA has slightly changed the dimensions in the decades that have passed since this was built, or this is a very close imitation by some other firm. Because the new shelves are just slightly off and do not fit. If I want shelves, I need to build my own.

Step one in my plan was to buy a drill, but in my cleaning and sorting of the basement, I found one. It’s a cheap model and not what I would buy – hence why it’s been lying unused. (Eric had a much better one.) But given the choice between this for free or a better model for plenty of money, this is absolutely good enough.

New step one: get the drill into a usable state. The plastic had leaked some sort of substance making it all sticky and gooey. Soap and water didn’t help. I tried cleaning it with gasoline, and that got the orange parts clean, but the black still felt disgusting. Tried acetone, and that started dissolving the plastic itself. Finally I oiled it in with paraffin oil, let it rest, and then washed it again with soap and water. And now it’s all good!

I also found a workbench in the basement. This is like a treasure hunt in my own basement. Again a cheapish model, and again it needed some oiling to make the screws run smoothly, but at zero kronor spent, a total steal. No more hunching over a step stool for sawing and drilling!

Step the next was buying timber. This is when I really wished the IKEA ready-made shelves had fit. The cost of the materials on their own was four or five times that of the finished product from IKEA. It’s just cheap pine, but if every little bit costs 50 to 70 kr and I need six per shelf then I’m quickly up at 1500 kr for four shelves. And that’s not even including the screws. I don’t know how IKEA do it.

The basement was nice and cool in the thirty-degree heat we’ve had, but after two days spent down there, I needed a break. Today was interior decorating day. Also today was less hot so it worked out nicely.

A free-standing wardrobe, together with some bookshelves, used to split my bedroom into two – a bedroom side and an office side, both rather small. With the wardrobe gone as of yesterday, and after me moving furniture around today, the room is back to being one space. (Moving a bookshelf is bloody tedious.) Much more open, light and spacious.

It’s a weird room now, though. There’s furniture around the edges – and a giant empty space in the middle. And two ceiling lights for a single room. The light fixtures are an easy fix, but I don’t know what to do with the room itself. A bigger bed, yes. But then what? What do I use the rest of the space for? Where do I put the dresser and the mirror? I’m probably letting the current configuration (especially the wall shelf above the bed) steer my thoughts too much. Time to get out squared paper and make a mockup starting from scratch.

While the bedroom thoughts are marinating, I finally hung up pictures that have been waiting for months. My Stockholm embroidery is now hanging in the sun room, next to Ingrid’s painting of sunflowers, where it was always intended to be.

Two large botanically-themed photo prints went up in the forest room, as well as another one of my embroideries.

When I hung up the prints, they were not at all level with each other. I was all shocked – I thought I was so careful when measuring out the positions for the wall hooks. And I had been! It turned out that the magnetic poster hangers didn’t match each other – the grooves for the string were not at the same distance for the two, at all.