Can’t get enough of them. The way the whole large tree is softly white, all covered in blossoms – this magnificent burst of energy to procreate!

There is a fridge in the living room.

The fridge is uncommonly free from drawings, class schedules, scout schedules, theatre tickets, funny magnets, and other junk. I’m sure that it will immediately fill up again as soon as it moves back into the kitchen.

The kitchen remodeling is about to start for real – Anton the builder and his sidekick will start tearing out the old kitchen soon. We emptied out everything from the old kitchen today, moving the essentials into the living room and packing away everything else. Half the office/library is full of boxes.

I like the Viburnum I planted a couple of years ago. Last year when I planted the hedge, I added two more (of hopefully the same variety) to keep it company.

The first one has had a few years to establish itself, and it shows. It prepares by putting out flower buds in winter already, and when spring comes, it’s all ready to go.

The second one is clearly playing catch-up and is only just budding now.

The third one seems to have died during the winter; I guess I’ll have to replace it.

The corydalis are flowering, and visited by bumblebees.

Finally a warm and sunny day, when it’s a pleasure to be outside. I spring cleaned the flower beds, removing last year’s dead plants to make room for this year’s growth. Eric swapped tires on the new car.

This is the state of our garden right now. A giant ditch cuts right through the front of it, from the street to the house. It does not just cut through the garden – it also cuts right through the retaining wall that we only just got done, and the newly planted hedge behind it…

We were just going to renovate the kitchen this year. But the mess of water pipes and water meter in the cupboard under the sink was seriously hindering that project, so the conclusion was that we needed to move the incoming water supply connection from the kitchen to the basement. It was only in the kitchen for historical reasons – if a builder tried to put it there today, it would never get approved. Plus the incoming water supply pipe is many decades old, made of galvanized steel, and probably not in a very good shape.

So in came the builder and the diggers and the plumber, and they measured and they planned and they consulted and discussed. And they dug, until the garden looked like a giant mess. As a small consolation, at least they didn’t have to dig up the paving between the stairs, or my planting in front of the house. I do hope the cherry tree survives this – quite a number of its branches and roots had to be cut.

Did I mention that the water pipe was old? And probably not in very good shape?

In fact it was in such a bad shape that all the digging and poking around it was enough to break it. I wasn’t here to see it happen; it must have been spectacular with water everywhere. By the time I got home, the water had been shut off and a temporary replacement pipe was in place. But only authorized Stockholm Vatten personnel are allowed to touch the valves of the municipal water supply, whether for turning it off or on, so we still didn’t have any water… (There are substantial fines for breaking that rule, so our diggers and plumbers didn’t even consider doing it themselves.) We had pizza for dinner – the kids were happy about that – and I made a visit to the neighbours to fill up some plastic cans so we could wash our hands and brush our teeth at least.

Finally late at night a Stockholm Vatten van turned up and we got our water back.

It was a long day.

More greens. And again they looked strong on paper but wrong in the kitchen in broad daylight. Needs more colour!

(This is the last one, I promise.)

Picked a green colour. Bought a sample, painted a leftover piece of wood with it. And when I put it in the kitchen, suddenly the green looked barely green at all. More like a pale greenish gray. We all agree that the kitchen is going to need a stronger colour than that.

We have a lot of different green objects in the kitchen, each one a different green. When they’re all small, the actual hue and tone don’t matter much, they all look nice. But when I try to imagine these colours on half the kitchen, some of them immediately appeal much more to me than others.

Perhaps the kitchen could match one of the green tones on the living room wallpaper?