Morning: cycled with Ingrid to a birthday party. I can do that kind of stuff again now that Adrian is somewhat used to being without me. It felt good to be able to give Ingrid my undivided attention for a while. And it felt good to cycle.

Afternoon: dug out dandelions from our lawn. I don’t aspire to a weed-free lawn, indeed I don’t aspire to any kind of a lawn, but I don’t want the dandelions to spread out of control. I got rid of a few dozen today, I think – rather satisfying. Meanwhile Ingrid made me a “soup” with dandelions and daisies, birch catkins and lilac flowers.

Evening: neither of the kids was tired after dinner so we headed to the playground. Or rather, Eric and Ingrid headed to the playground, and I thought I’d let Adrian wind down for bedtime. He was immediately upset about their departure – started crying as soon as they left, became happy again when we went into the hall, and dived from my arms towards the stroller. So we followed them (although with a hip seat instead of the stroller) and watched Ingrid enjoy herself on the swing and the slide and the merry-go-round. Then we fed dandelion leaves to the sheep who live at Spanga gymnasium next to the playground.

A busy day: it feels like these remaining days are my last chance to get things done at home.

Some more painting of the play house while Adrian slept. Playgroup. Supermarket. Went to the hardware store to see if I could borrow their fan deck of NCS colours. (Unfortunately he answer was no, because they’ve lost too many of those expensive decks, despite taking down folks’ names and numbers.) Weeded and dug through the top layer of soil in two of our planting boxes with strawberries.

Adrian has, in the last few days, started to demand solid food. Previously I’d just put him in his highchair and give him some food when I wanted to eat, so he could get used to the concept, have some fun, and we’d keep each other company. But now he has been fussy and I’ve gone through my checklist (sleep? boredom? breast? nappy?) and then offered him food, and seen him wolf it down. His and my meal schedules are thus no longer in sync, so I’ve spent more time than usual preparing food and cleaning up him and the kitchen afterwards.

I’d planned to take Ingrid shoe shopping after preschool but she was not at all amenable to that. Too hot (it was another hot and sunny day) or too tired or hungry or thirsty, or all of that – in any case she was in a very precarious mood all the way home. Then we put a picnic blanket under the cherry tree, I made us both some smoothies with frozen raspberries and blueberries, bananas, and apple juice, and we relaxed together. She felt much better after that.

I noticed wasps on the kitchen windows on at least five separate occasions, and never in any other part of the house, or near the door. Now I’m wondering if they have a nest somewhere inside the walls there – there are gaps around and beneath the newly installed windows, and they could be coming out of those. If that’s the case we will have to plug those holes quickly.

(Actually I missed one wasps’ nest in my list yesterday – we also found an old, abandoned one above the ceiling of the old veranda. I guess wasps really like our house.)

As I was painting Ingrid’s play house, I found the beginnings of a wasps’ nest inside. They’re fast builders: yesterday I saw one of them was flying around there, but no sign of a nest yet. Early this afternoon she had built slightly more than half of the first sphere. Now at ten o’clock when Eric took it down, that sphere was almost closed and she had started on the second layer. It was a beautiful, delicate construction. I wish I didn’t have to destroy it, but kids and wasps in a semi-enclosed room make a really bad combination.

We have had wasps in the garden both last summer and the one before. First they had a nest under the ridge of our roof (outside) and afterwards we kept finding dozens of dead wasps in the bedroom on the other side (which wasn’t in use at the time). The second time they nested inside one of the railway sleepers that make up a low wall around our garden. With a bit of luck perhaps the queen will give up after this failure and go somewhere else.

Friends P and G with their daughter H visited us in the morning. We looked at how the remodelling has progressed, and browsed wallpaper books together. It is striking to see H and Adrian side by side – born within 2 days of each other, about the same general size and shape, but so different in behaviour. H can just sit in someone’s arms and look at the world, quietly twirling her hands. Adrian sits for 30 seconds, then starts twisting or jumping up and down, or stands up, or complains.

Then we went to IKEA to buy six tall cupboards for the office. We’ll be using their tall kitchen cabinets, but will buy doors from an independent supplier. Anton needs the cupboards’ measurements so that he can install the flooring in that room – the interiors are finally getting to the point where the actual final layer will be put in place!

We straightened up the outdoor drying rack that I put up the other day – it needed some wooden wedges between the pipe in the ground and the vertical pole. We decided on measurements for the wooden deck. We selected wallpapers.

A busy day. Phew.

The wallpapers – living room, dining room, office cabinet doors, stairwell:

The colours are not quite right since I took the photos just now in the evening light, but you get the general idea. For official pictures, you can go to the producer’s web site and use their Wallpaper Finder. It’s a crappy flash application or something so I cannot give direct links, but the collection is called Gammalsvenska and the article numbers are 087-16, 062-05, 087-17 and 044-17.

This morning I was going to plant our overblown daffodils from the pot in the kitchen into the garden, to join the ones already growing there. When I sat down to dig the first hole I saw that I was surrounded by cherry seedlings. They were legion. I don’t want them to root themselves properly or we will never get rid of them – run them over with a lawnmower and they will just keep coming back, until there’s a hard, gnarly lump of a root with pointy stumps sticking up – painful to step on with bare feet. So I plucked them out with their roots. I counted three hundred and sixty-eight. Or perhaps three hundred and seventy, I suspect I lost count twice. But since they were so concentrated it was quick work, a second or two for each one, so it was no more than fifteen minutes’ work. (Otherwise I’d have given up far earlier.)

Then I planted the daffodils. I hope they will like their new home. This autumn I would like to plant some more crocuses there as well. We have some, but they make more of an impression in larger amounts.

The primroses growing on that side of the house are puny this year: small leaves, really short stalks, and small flowers. Too dry, perhaps? Nothing like last year’s display.

One hundred and thirty-six

We had snow this morning, as mentioned before, and the weather improved only marginally during the day: a few degrees above freezing, and raining off and on. Yuck.

Nevertheless we went out to Vällingby to return some jeans I bought for Ingrid last week.

On the way out I stopped by the Desigual store in KFem because I like to look at their clothes. Desigual (and Odd Molly, another of my favourites) make lovely clothes that I really really like. I’m normally a “less is more” kind of gal but Desigual’s clothes are so happy that that philosophy goes right out of the window. But I almost never buy any of their clothes. They are always great in all sorts of ways but the colours are not quite right for me. Or they look great on the rack but not on me. Or they really look and feel lovely but they’re impractical or hard to care for – silky tunics that require lots of ironing, or dressy tops that I would rarely find the opportunity to wear. And they are expensive. Really expensive. If they were cheap I might buy them anyway, despite those buts, but not at those prices. And then, today – 30% off all Desigual clothes! And a lovely top that fit me! The first time I’ve found something there that I could not just covet but wear. Even with 30% off it wasn’t exactly cheap but I couldn’t let the opportunity pass.

Adrian is teething AGAIN. (So that’s why he slept so badly and cried so much during the night.) It seems to bother him a lot more than Ingrid’s teeth did. This time, wise after previous experiences, I dosed him with paracetamol as soon as I was sure it was teething, and then ibuprofen in the evening when that dose ran out, so the day didn’t turn out too bad. But good god I am tired of this. If he is to get 16 teeth in about a year (6 months to 18 months of age) and will spend two to three days crying for each of them, that means over 30 days of crying, or about a tenth of that year. I wish he could get them all at once, in a week of serious crying, say, but then it would be over and done with.

Anton the Builder finished installed the new door and window in our bedroom and we moved back in. Now Eric is upstairs preparing Ingrid’s room so Anton can do the same there tomorrow and the day after. The photo here shows the new door (our room) next to the old one (Ingrid’s room): nice-looking solid wood vs. dreary dark veneer over chipboard. Plus the new ones are straight, well made and carefully installed, so they open and close without effort, whereas the current door to Ingrid’s room is so skewed that we have to leave it ajar, or otherwise she wouldn’t be able to get out of the room at night.

The builders are invading “our” half of the house again. This time the bottom floor is OK but they are replacing both the window and the door in our bedroom, as well as doing some electrical work up there. Installing doors and windows is dusty, dirty work, since it means cutting and screwing into drywall, so we’ve removed all bedding, clothes etc from the bedroom, and crammed it into Ingrid’s already-cramped bedroom. Tonight I will be sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Ingrid’s room, and Adrian will be on a cot mattress that we just barely managed to squeeze in beside mine. Total remaining free floor area: about enough to put both feet down, between the door and my mattress. It remains to be seen whether anyone in that room will actually get any sleep. Eric, who will be sleeping on the living room floor, gets the best deal.

The remodelling is continuing and the rooms are taking shape. Now I’ve started giving some serious thought to wall finishes and colours. (The floors we have already pretty much decided: pine plank in the new living room and the office, to match the existing living room. And honey-coloured tile in the entry hall and the walk-in closet, same as in the mud room.)

At first I had simply assumed that of course the walls will be white. I now realize I thought this way mostly out of inertia and laziness. All the walls were white when we moved in so I’ve gotten used to that look, and it requires very little thought. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that what I’m doing is just postponing the issue. We will have to decorate and furnish the rooms, and that will NOT be done all in white, so I will have to choose colours anyway.

When I think about houses, homes and other rooms I’ve seen, it’s not the white ones that I have strong memories of. I remember our yellow striped living room from Enskede. I remember the dark brick walls from our flat in Constantine Court. When I look at photos of rooms, I’m rarely attracted by the ones with white walls.

Then I found a blog post about how white is a snob, quoting from a book:

Bad white spaces are those where white is not used as a colour but in the misguided notion that it is the avoidance of colour. This is when white looks bald and empty, cheap and unfriendly. Or it can look unfinished, a beginning still waiting for something to happen!

And that is exactly how the white walls in our house have felt. Bald and empty, waiting for something.

Now I’ve spent several hours browsing through the archives of the blog, Colour Me Happy, and found much food for thought. Why you need a starting point for your colour choices. How to think about colour flow in your house, and an example of how to achieve it. How a light colour will NOT make a dark room lighter but just accentuate the shadows. How to test the colours you’re thinking of using. All this is shown and explained with lots of photos. Now I don’t think there was a single interior there that I really loved, but that’s not the point. I loved the thinking.

Do you have any advice on choosing colours for a home? I have the beginnings of an overarching colour scheme in my head but would still like to hear your top tips.

Woke at 6 because Anton the Builder started work on removing the temporary wall in our new living room.

Around 8 o’clock the sliding glass doors arrived. They came on a flatbed truck with a huge crane: the whole section arrives in one piece, 5.3 metres long and weighing 680 kg. All this had to be lifted straight from the truck to where it’s going to sit – since it’s so big and heavy you can’t really move it without a crane. In our case this required a crane with a 17-metre reach, and 5 guys to get it in place. And because it was to be fitted into an existing wall they couldn’t just put it down, it had to be slotted into the wall from the side.

I spent the next hour or so gawping and taking photos, only reluctantly taking a break to get Ingrid ready to leave (brush teeth, brush hair, etc) and then take her to preschool. By the time I was back, the wall/window/door section was in place and the builders were busy adjusting it to get it level and flush with the wall.

The room now looks astounding. So light, so airy. I so look forward to having it ready for use.

Playgroup with Adrian. Grocery shopping.

Ingrid had somehow hurt her left big toe at preschool and couldn’t walk on that foot, said it hurt when she bent the foot. Good thing we had the bike – cycling doesn’t require her to put any weight on her toes or to bend them. Lots of crying during the afternoon since of course she wouldn’t sit still and kept hurting the toe again. If it doesn’t get better by tomorrow we’ll make another trip to the local clinic.

Adrian also cried a lot; I think there must be more teeth on the way.

The temporary wall, about a month ago

No wall

Lifting

More lifting

Slotting in place

The new wall

Adrian still farting and pooping all the time. I counted five dirty nappies on the floor after the night. I think he produced three of them between the hours of 4 and 5 in the morning. Then he was so tired in the morning that he didn’t even wake when the alarm went off at 7 and the rest of us got up – he slept until a quarter to nine. Pretty whingey most of the day, not at all interested in food, nursing lots instead.

Went to the supermarket, did some laundry. Finished entering my backlog of receipts into our expense tracker; started checking off the latest quarterly bank statement.

Tried to remove the gravel that’s been left in some corners of our garden by the snow dumped there. Some parts had so much gravel that you couldn’t see the grass or the earth. A stiff brush worked best to get the gravel out of the grass, and then simply scooping it up with my hands, or just scraping or brushing it straight into the hedge. There, it might actually be useful and keep the weeds away.

Ingrid wanted to go to bed unusually early. Once in bed it turned out she wasn’t actually tired at all, she just wanted to cuddle with me. Well, tough luck – Adrian isn’t going to accept sitting quietly in a dim room. I had to leave the room with him, so she got the opposite of what she’d planned. That’s what you get when you try to trick your mum.